THE SACRED SPORE - POST-ANTHROPOCENE PROJECT
A Ritual of Ecological Surrender.
In a Post-Anthropocene future - where human systems have collapsed and death exists at an overwhelming scale - the question is no longer how we mourn, but what happens to our bodies when we’re gone.
Across many cultures, the dead are preserved, embalmed, buried, or cremated. These practices keep the body intact for longer, delaying its return to the earth. In a world without caretakers, bodies would accumulate - remaining on the surface, unable to decompose quickly enough, and creating new pressures on the landscape.
The Sacred Spore proposes a cultural correction: a chosen acceleration of decay, and a ritualised return.
The piece is imagined not as a human invention, but as something commissioned by fungi - the earth’s primary recyclers, operating beyond human timescales. Here, they are understood as a distributed, god-like force: not a single entity, but a system that persists through continual breakdown and regeneration.
The ritual begins before birth.
During pregnancy, an offshoot is cultivated from the mother’s Sacred Spore - a continuation of her fungal lineage. At birth, this is combined with spores selected by a second parent or community member, gathered from the local environment. Together, they form a composite strain: inherited and situated.
This cultivated spore is encased within a wearable object and placed against the infant’s body, resting near the navel. Its form references the womb - a site of origin and return, where life begins and now ends. Within it, dormant spores are held in small ovarian structures, carrying the potential for future growth.
It is worn throughout life.
It grows slowly with the body, becoming skin-like. It does nothing.
As people move and form new communities, these spores travel with them. Bodies become carriers of fungal life, enabling different strains to disperse and re-establish across the world after death. Human movement becomes a vector for biodiversity.
After death, the process begins.
As the body cools and breaks down, shifts in chemistry activate the spores. The fungi break from their ovarian structures, emerging into the surrounding flesh, where they begin to grow - accelerating decomposition and returning the body to the soil.
For a brief period, small mushrooms appear at the surface of the body - a quiet, ceremonial gesture, replacing the funeral that no longer takes place - before collapsing back into the ground.
Each body becomes a site of release. A transfer. A continuation.
Etched onto the surface is a statement of intent:
Do not resuscitate. Do not preserve. Allow me to return.
Wearing The Sacred Spore is an agreement made at birth and carried through life - an offering to the soil, an act of humility and reciprocity, and a relinquishing of control over what comes after.
In life, the piece is a reminder of that promise.
In death, it fulfils it.
The Sacred Spore transforms jewellery into a vessel of ecological devotion - a ritual of surrender to the cycles of decay and renewal. It invites a release of control, and a return to the systems that continue without us.
It asks not how we might live forever, but how we return.
The Sacred Spore expands jewellery beyond adornment into a biological and cultural system. It remains jewellery through its relationship to the body, its permanence, and its symbolic role - but it operates as a ritual object that activates meaning across a lifetime and into death.
I’m interested in pushing jewellery beyond ornament into something that holds responsibility. This piece still functions as jewellery - it’s worn on the body, carries identity and lineage - but it also acts as a contract with the earth.