Chris Drury, Dust to Dust limited edition print is made from a spore print of an Amanita Phalloides mushroom. It is otherwise known as a Death Cap . The artist has specially printed ten of these signed and dedicated to GroundWork Gallery.

This fungus contains three active poisons: amatoxins, phallotoxins, and virotoxins for which there are no antidotes. Chris has made a number of works using this mushroom as a theme. There is the drawing Amanita Phalloides, 2016. But also, he hand painted a projected version of this spore print on the gallery wall in 2021 for Nature’s Mysterious Networks. It remained on the wall for the rest of the year. The image represents both the beauty of nature and its terrible power.

Mushrooms feed you, alter your mind, are medicinal and, as in this case, can kill you. They are nature’s recyclers, breaking down dead matter into soil on which new life can grow. As such they represent life, and death as transformation.

About the artist

Chris Drury was a key exhibitor in GroundWork’s exhibition Natures Mysterious Networks. He is an artist with an enormous international reputation and long experience making art in, with and about nature. Chris normally travels a great deal. He responds to diverse requests for exhibitions, collaborations, installations and site specific works outside.

Chris describes himself as an environmental artist. He makes site specific nature based sculpture, or land art. His work connects different phenomena in the world, opposites and contrasts. Specifically he works between nature and culture, inner and outer space and microcosm and macrocosm. Often he collaborates with scientists and technicians from a broad spectrum of disciplines. He is prepared to use whatever visual means, technologies and materials best suit the situation.

Recent projects include a residency at The Nirox Foundation in The Cradle of Humankind, South Africa, working with paleontologists, geologists and anthropologists,  a British Antarctic Survey residency in Antarctica, a work for the Australian National University in Canberra and an exhibition about place, ecology and politics at The Nevada Museum of Art called Mushrooms|Clouds.