Awareness and Advocacy through creative arts

Goal

To greatly improve fungal infection outcomes in patients through public and health care professional awareness leading to improved clinical suspicion and diagnosis.

Why focus on fungi and fungal disease?

Fungi are beautiful and fascinating. Essential to our ecosystem and many industries (i.e. alcohol, bread and cheese making), some can also cause human disease.  Fungal diseases are mostly hidden. Improving public and healthcare professional awareness of fungal disease is essential to saving lives, reducing blindness and making people healthier. 

This program aims to engage the creative arts community in music, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, narratives and animation to create ‘art from fungi’. With remarkable shapes and life-styles, fungi are an under-explored aspect of nature. By linking interesting biology and disease with remarkable microscopic images, we expect to harness the creative spirit of numerous artists of many genres and capture the public’s imagination. The focus is on microscopic fungi, not ‘toadstools’, which are rarely involved in human disease.

Project LIFE Student Art Competitions 2012

This program aims to engage the creative arts community in music, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, narratives and animation to create ‘art from fungi’. With remarkable shapes and life-styles, fungi are an under-explored aspect of nature. By linking interesting biology and disease with remarkable microscopic images, we expect to harness the creative spirit of numerous artists of many genres and capture the public’s imagination. The focus is on microscopic fungi, not ‘toadstools’, which are rarely involved in human disease.