Plant Bio

There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric culture, challenging deeply ingrained ideas about what it means to be “blind”. For millennia, blind­ness has been used to signify such things as thoughtlessness (“blind faith”), irrationality (“blind rage”), and unconsciousness (“blind evolution”). But at the same time, blind people have been othered as the recipients of special powers as compensation for lost sight (from the poetic gifts of John Milton to the heightened senses of the comic book hero Daredevil).

The natural world is a treasure trove of wonders, and often, the most extraordinary secrets are hidden right beneath our feet. Among these veiled marvels lies the kingdom of fungi – a realm so vast and diverse that we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of its potential. It’s estimated that there are somewhere between 2.2 to 3.8 million species of fungi on Earth, a staggering figure that dwarfs the plant and animal kingdoms combined. Yet, incredibly, we’ve only managed to study and record a mere 4% of these fungal entities. Think about that for a moment: a vast, hidden world ...