Anteprojeto
ALL THAT RISES IS NURTURED FROM BELOW
Sculpting the Weight of Feminine Labor and the Mycelial Body
ABSTRACT
Sculpture holds what language resolves. Feminist theory has named care's invisibility by mapping it, arguing it , and arriving at precise and necessary conclusions. Sculpture makes invisibility physically felt, registering it in the body before it reaches the mind. This project makes this distinction both its starting point and its method.
Feminine care work simultaneously sustains social life and disappears into it. It is absorbed into the social fabric, made to appear natural rather than labored, essential but unacknowledged, which manifests its own structural violence. Mycelium is the central figure. The fungal network that nourishes everything above it while remaining hidden and depleting itself in the act of giving. The correspondence is structural. What sustains disappears and what nourishes depletes. To breathe for others has costs that are never replenished.
The project unfolds across four material approaches, each tracing a different register of care's accumulated weight: endurance, residue, breath, dispersal. Together they press the question of what accumulation, weight, atmospheric release, and living biological matter can make tangible for a body standing before them. The theoretical framework draws on feminist labor theory (Arlie Russell Hochschild, Silvia Federici, Sara Ahmed, bell hooks), new materialist and ecological thought (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing , Donna Haraway), and practice-based research methods (Henk Borgdorff, Griselda Pollock).
KEYWORDS
Emotional labor • Mycelium • Weight • Breath • Invisibility
INTRODUCTION
Beneath every visible structure runs an invisible one. Mycelium, the vegetative body of fungi, spreading through soil in branching networks, nourishes what grows above while remaining hidden from it. It sustains and transfers, decomposes what has died, is essential to the ecology it serves, and is unseen by those it feeds. This project proposes mycelium as a conceptual and political figure for the invisible infrastructure of feminine care work, the unacknowledged labor of nourishing and maintaining social life while remaining unregistered within it.
The inquiry is located within feminist sculptural practice, and the guiding question is at once material and political: what does the body carry and how does that carrying leave a mark?
Arlie Russell Hochschild's concept of emotional labor (The Managed Heart, 2012) mapped the feeling-work women are required to perform and identified it as extractable, measurable, and chronically undervalued. Silvia Federici's political economy of reproductive labor (Caliban and the Witch, 2004) showed that care work is not incidental to capital but constitutive of it, and rendered invisible precisely so it need not be compensated. Sara Ahmed's theorization of affective stickiness (The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2014) extended this into material terms: affect does not disappear when the interaction ends, it adheres. It alters the surface it lands on. bell hooks (Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 2000) situated this within the structural conditions of race and gender that determine whose care is most consumed and least acknowledged.
What aesthetic practice is uniquely equipped to answer is the question of what this carrying looks and feels like as form. Sculpture holds what discourse can only describe. Where language arrives at conclusions, a physical form in space asks the body to register something before naming it. That gap between knowing and feeling is where this research begins.
Mycelium runs through all the approaches as a formal agent, conceptual figure, and structural logic. It enacts the project's thesis.
The initial material investigations share a formal logic of accumulation: forms are built up, stacked, layered, and deposited rather than arranged. The materials are chosen for what they carry and what they refuse. Ceramic, stone, metal, atmospheric systems, and living mycelium move across registers of endurance, residue, breath, and dispersal. What connects them is the question of what persists after the laboring body has withdrawn: the warmth that remains, the weight that does not shift, the air that holds and releases a scent without evidence. The tension between weight and air, between what endures and what dissolves, is not resolved. It is held in suspension, which is the formal argument the work makes.
The research is in dialogue with artists whose practices ask what accumulated material memory, living systems, and biological matter can do as sculptural form. Their relevance is methodological and material: each has pursued what maintaining, carrying, and dissolving can look like in physical space. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969) and her subsequent decades at the New York Sanitation Department made the labor that sustains a city plainly legible. Louise Bourgeois’s Cells series (1990s), charged domestic objects held behind wire and glass, and her spider figures with their doubled logic of menace and protection, address the body under sustained psychological weight. Eva Hesse’s Contingent (1969) and Repetition Nineteen (1968) introduced a formal logic of endurance and collapse through materials including latex, rope, fiberglass, that resist permanence on their own terms. Berlinde De Bruyckere’s Kreupelhout – Cripplewood (2012) and We Are All Flesh (2009), with their entangled wax, animal hides, and horse hair, render the carrying body explicitly: forms that hold and are held, that suggest exhaustion without resolving into pathos. Fujiko Nakaya’s fog installations, from Fog Sculpture (1970) at Expo ‘70 onward, transform ambient conditions rather than occupying space; the work exists in the altered air itself, not in any fixed form. This is the direct precedent for What the Æther Holds.
Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. "MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART, 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition: 'CARE'." 1969. Republished on Pompeii Commitment, December 21, 2020. https://pompeiicommitment.org/en/commitment/mierle-laderman-ukeles-manifesto-for-maintenance-art-1969-proposal-for-an-exhibition-care/.
Berlinde De Bruyckere
Kreupelhout – Cripplewood
2012
Wax, epoxy, iron, wood, fabric, blankets, rope
230 x 1790 x 410 cm / 90 1/2 x 704 3/4 x 161 3/8 in
Louise Bourgeois
CELL XXVI (Detail)
2003
Steel, fabric, aluminum, stainless steel, wood
252.7 x 434.3 x 304.8 cm
Nakaya, Fujiko
Fog Life [Nebel Leben]
Installation view
Haus der Kunst, Munich, April 8–July 31, 2022.
Photo by Andrea Rossetti. Accessed June 3, 2026. https://www.hausderkunst.de/eintauchen/fujiko-nakaya-nebel-leben.
The theoretical framework draws on Hochschild (2012), Federici (2004), hooks (2000), and Ahmed (2014) for the political account of care's invisibility; on Tsing (2015) and Haraway (2016) for an ethics of interdependence under damaged conditions. It specifically reflects Tsing's account of mycelial reciprocity, the fungal network that sustains through its own depletion, that gives what it cannot recover, as a structural model for care's exhaustion; and on Henk Borgdorff (The Conflict of the Faculties, 2012) and Griselda Pollock (2009) for the claim that practice-based research produces a kind of knowledge that analytical inquiry cannot reach on its own terms.
The next phase of this project will pursue living mycelium as active material by exploring both its use as a forming substrate and its capacity to colonize existing objects in real biological time. It will push into questions of scale and permanence: a visceral need to work with tactile materials at large scale, objects of physical weight that command space and defy transformation into the currency of social media. This is, in part, a response to thirty-plus years spent in an industry organized around disposability, where everything was temporary and always on its way to being replaced or out of style. To make sculpture that endures is, in this context, a political position as much as a formal one.
OBJECTIVES
I. General Objective
To investigate what formal and material strategies sculpture can deploy to make the invisible infrastructure of feminine care work physically felt through accumulation, weight, atmospheric dispersal, breath, and living biological material.
II. Specific Objectives
Theoretical: To develop the application of Hochschild's (2012) concept of emotional labor, Federici's (2004) analysis of reproductive work, Ahmed's (2014) theory of affective stickiness, and Tsing's (2015) account of mycelial reciprocity as frameworks for understanding care's structural invisibility and material residue. To bring Borgdorff's (2012) account of artistic research into dialogue with this framework as methodological grounding.
Conceptual: To test mycelium as both conceptual figure and active material, from structural correspondence to physical, biological enactment, and to investigate whether accumulation, endurance, and dispersal can function as sculptural arguments independent of narrative framing. To work within the tension between weight and air, permanence and dissolution, as the formal territory this body of work inhabits.
Practical: To develop a coherent body of work across different sculptural approaches, using ceramic, stone, metal, atmospheric systems, and living mycelium as primary materials. To introduce actual mycelial growth as a formal and conceptual strategy, exploring both its use as a forming material and its capacity to colonize existing objects. To push into questions of scale: to work with tactile material at a physical scale that makes weight undeniable.
Methodological: To produce a Project Report and public exhibition demonstrating, in Borgdorff's terms, what research through practice can hold that theory alone cannot and how that work produces knowledge not only through its interpretation, but through its making afterward.
THE STATE OF THE ART
The question of care's invisibility has been addressed with precision in feminist theory over many decades. Arlie Russell Hochschild's The Managed Heart (2012) introduced the concept of emotional labor, the management of feeling as a professional requirement, predominantly assigned to women, extractable and measurable but rarely compensated. Hochschild's framework identified a form of work absorbed into definitions of femininity so thoroughly it no longer registered as work. Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch (2004) extended this analysis into a political economy, arguing that reproductive labor, the work of maintaining social and biological life, is not incidental to capitalist accumulation but foundational to it, rendered invisible precisely because its visibility requires compensation. Together, these texts establish the theoretical ground on which this research stands: care work is structural, gendered, and systematically unacknowledged and uncompensated.
Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014) provided a framework for thinking about care not as an event but as residue. Ahmed's theorization of affective stickiness, in which the way emotions adhere to bodies and surfaces, accumulating texture and resistance over time, connects feminist labor theory to sculptural practice: if care leaves something on the body, what does that something look like as form?
Anna Tsing Lowenhaupt's The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) brings mycelium into this framework as more than analogy. Tsing's account of collaborative survival under damaged conditions, of life that sustains through reciprocal exchange, that nourishes the forest above while remaining invisible to it, offers a model of care that is structural, precarious, and exhaustible. What is central is Tsing's insistence on reciprocity. The fungal network gives what it cannot recover. The depletion is constitutive, not incidental. It is the mechanism by which nourishment is transferred.
In art practice, a parallel lineage has approached maintenance, invisible labor, and the carrying body from the inside. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969) was the first explicit claim that maintenance, the continuous, unacknowledged work of sustaining life and institutions , constitutes artistic practice. Her subsequent decades as artist-in-residence at the New York Sanitation Department made the labor that keeps a city functioning plainly visible. Louise Bourgeois’s Cells series (1990s)presents accumulations of domestic objects, clothing, and tools held behind wire cages and glass, addressing the body under sustained psychological weight. Her spider figures extend this into a doubled logic of menace and protection, simultaneously holding and threatening to hold . Eva Hesse’s Contingent (1969) and Repetition Nineteen (1968) introduced a formal logic of endurance and collapse through materials, including latex, fiberglass, rope, that resist permanence, asking what form remains when materials degrade on their own terms. Berlinde De Bruyckere’s Kreupelhout – Cripplewood (2012) and We Are All Flesh (2009), with their entangled wax, animal hides, and horse hair, render the carrying body explicitly in forms that hold and are held, that conjure exhaustion without sentimentality.
Fog as sculptural medium was developed by Fujiko Nakaya, whose atmospheric installations, from Fog Sculpture (1970) at Expo ‘70 in Osaka onward, transform ambient conditions rather than placing objects. The work exists in the altered air itself, not in any fixed form. This is the direct precedent for What the Æther Holds.
The role of practice-based research in producing knowledge that analytical inquiry cannot reach on its own terms has been theorized by Henk Borgdorff (The Conflict of the Faculties, 2012), whose distinction between research on, for, and through art grounds this project's methodological claim, that the sculptural works constitute the research itself.
While mycelium has been used extensively in design and architecture as a sustainable forming material, its use in fine art as both material and conceptual agent, specifically in relation to feminist inquiry, remains largely unexplored. This is the gap this research proposes to bridge: mycelium as a living system that enacts, in real biological time, the structural condition this project investigates. What sustains depletes and what nourishes disappears.
PRECEDENTS AND MOTIVATION
For twenty-five years, the artist led Dizon Inc., a New York-based creative studio working in fashion. The studio managed aesthetic vision, client relationships, and creative teams for large-scale events. The most demanding element of the work was the continuous anticipation of needs that were rarely articulated clearly, absorbing tension before it surfaced, holding the shape of an ecosystem that everyone moved through without noticing what kept it standing. The artist chose to close the studio and relocate to Portugal, and enrolled in the Mestrado em Artes Plásticas at FBAUP. The works produced in the first year of the program constituted the immediate material antecedents of this research.
Across the initial investigations, the formal logic is one of accumulation and tension: between weight and air, between what endures and what dissolves, between the surface that holds and the interior that has been held. These interconnected episodes within a single sustained inquiry create both synergies and complications through material experimentation.
The process begins with accumulation of a different kind: the collection of visual references and material samples across fields including art, ecology, architecture, craft, scientific imagery, assembled until a coherence is recognized. The studio becomes the site of material exploration: handling, combining, breaking, building up. The works develop from what the materials suggest through their weight, surface, fragility, and resistance. The color palette follows from the materials rather than being imposed on them. Sketching comes later, and only partially. Most of the formal decisions happen through contact, in the moment when the material speaks back.
Ceramic is hand-built and kiln-fired; it holds the trace of pressure and breath even after baking. Stone is selected for density and surface quality and for what it refuses to do. Metal is used structurally and intentionally hidden or obscured: the armature that bears the load beneath what is immediately visible. Epoxy and construction materials are applied as deposit, not decoration. Scent and fog are the materials that cannot be held. They pique the senses before language intervenes and register as memory or weight, then dissolve without evidence of having existed. Mycelium, now entering the practice, grows in the dark, colonizes, and nourishes what is above it while remaining below.
These are materials chosen for what they can carry, and for what they refuse. The tension between weight and air and between what endures and what dissolves, is the formal territory this body of work inhabits. Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology of inhabited space offers a philosophical register for what these works attempt: the body as a membrane between interior and exterior, the way what has been carried internally can be given outward form, made available to another body standing before it and available to that body's analysis.
The question that drove the work was structural and physical: what did thirty-plus years of that labor leave? The accumulated weight of decades of managing more than one showed, of sustaining continuous systems of anticipation and care for clients who often could not name what they needed, for teams, and for the work itself. The move to Portugal and the beginning of a formal practice in sculpture was not a rupture but a shift in pressure: the same force, differently channeled. Reading Arlie Russell Hochschild, the artist recognized what had been sustained for decades as emotional labor at an industrial scale. The distinction between what the work was and what it simply appeared to be had remained invisible to everyone but the one doing it.
The antecedents of this research are not only the works made in the first year of the MFA, but the thirty years that preceded them — a period of sustained, largely unacknowledged care work that this practice is now attempting to give material form. The subject of this research is the work: the formal object, the sculptural argument standing in a room that presses into the body before that body has named it. The transition to working with living mycelium as actual material, planned for the dissertation year, represents the logical next step: from sculpture that argues for the logic of mycelium to sculpture that enacts it, in real biological time, depleting its substrate in the act of growing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Borgdorff, Henk. The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012.
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2004.
Federici, Silvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press, 2012.
Pollock, Griselda. "Art/Trauma/Representation." Parallax 15, no. 1 (2009): 40–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534640802604372.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Updated ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell, and Anne Machung. The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home. New York: Penguin Books, 2012.
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. 2nd ed. Cambridge: South End Press, 2000.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.
Pollock, Griselda. “Art/Trauma/Representation.” Parallax 15, no. 1 (2009): 40–54.
Stamets, Paul. Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2005.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition ‘CARE.’” 1969.
ANNEX
Additional references:
Benglis, Lynda. Hills and Clouds. 2014. Cast polyurethane with phosphorescence and stainless steel, 10'2" x 18'1" x 18'3". Courtesy the artist and Cheim & Read, New York. Storm King Art Center. https://stormking.org/exhibitions/benglis/hillsandclouds.html.
Benglis, Lynda. Pima. 2013. Glazed ceramic, 50.8 x 40.6 x 30.5 cm. Xavier Hufkens, Brussels. https://www.xavierhufkens.com/artworks/lynda-benglis-pima.
Benglis, Lynda. Ghost Dance/Pedmarks. 1998. Gold leaf on bronze, 7' x 36" x 25" (213.4 x 91.4 x 63.5 cm). Gift of Agnes Gund. Museum of Modern Art, New York (Object no. 737.1998). https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81826.
Berlant, Lauren. "Cruel Optimism." differences 17, no. 3 (2006): 20–36.
Bourgeois, Louise. CELL (YOU BETTER GROW UP), 1993 (detail) steel, glass, marble, ceramic, wood, mirror, 210,8 x 208.3 x 212.1 cm. The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas.
Chow, Denise. "Mystery Popped: Science of Bubbles Decoded." Live Science, May 9, 2013. https://www.livescience.com/29465-bubbles-science-foam-physics.html.
De Bruyckere, Berlinde. Embalmed – Twins I, 2017; Embalmed – Twins II, 2017; Wax, fabric, leather, rope, wood, iron, epoxy; 197 x 158 x 615 cm; 190 x 145 x 570 cm; Iron structure: 80 x 107 x 178 cm
Hesse, Eva.(No title), 1960. Brown ink on paper, 27.8 x 34.7 cm
Mendieta, Ana. Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico. 1976. The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. https://www.anamendietaartist.com/work/67f45e26-9b6f-4358-92d8-01f3c4091410-xsyhr-lgr36/67f45e26-9b6f-4358-92d8-01f3c4091410-xsyhr-lgr36/67f45e26-9b6f-4358-92d8-01f3c4091410-xsyhr-lgr36.
Moshfegh, Ottessa. My Year of Rest and Relaxation. New York: Penguin Press, 2018.
Nakaya, Fujiko. Foggy Forest. 1992. Fog sculpture installation. Children's Forest, Showa Kinen Park, Tachikawa, Tokyo. Photograph by Shigeo Ogawa. Courtesy of the artist. Published in Finn Blythe, "Fujiko Nakaya: The Japanese Artist Sculpting Magic with Fog," Hero, May 6, 2020. https://hero-magazine.com/article/171200/fujiko-nakaya.
Nengudi, Senga. RSVP. 1977/2003. Pantyhose and sand. Senga Nengudi official website. https://www.sengasenga.com/works/rsvp?itemId=k0wb1jrucdlqu6ypc3xb8vk7hp435q.
Nylind, Linda. View of "Lee Bul" (Crashing), Hayward Gallery, London. 2018. Photograph. Published in Gilda Williams, "Lee Bul," Artforum 57, no. 2 (October 2018). https://www.artforum.com/events/lee-bul-6-241538/.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London: Heinemann, 1963.
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life. New York: Penguin House, 2020.