I have long wanted to create a series of prints around the theme of Mushrooms after collecting many photographs in local woodland. I felt they would make an excellent theme for a project. After discovering the aptly titled ‘Mushrooms’ by Sylvia Plath I was provided with my starting point for the project. This poem uses mushrooms as a metaphor for the limited lives of women after the second world war with the return of men from active service. Their vital contribution was ignored and and they were expected to give up their new found freedoms. 

Plath uses the line “Perfectly voiceless, Widen the crannies, Shoulder through holes” to show that in their own quiet and gentle way, women continued to slowly assert their influence on the postwar western world. 

Wanting to avoid the sort of anthropomorphised Disney image of mushrooms from ‘Fantasia’, I decided to represent their shadowy existence, by making my own mushrooms dark and tenebrous in nature. These mushrooms represent a time after the poem. Beyond “Our foot is in the door,” when they have become powerful and strong, pushing through, occupying space, demanding a place in the world.

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