SIGNED COPIES
In Fruiting Bodies, Ying Ang reimagines the mushroom as both biological form and feminist metaphor — an emergent force that resists containment, expectation, and the traditional narratives of female purpose. Photographed in inner-city Melbourne parks, the book asks: must growth and abundance always be tied to reproduction? Or can there be another kind of fertility — errant, non-linear, wise?
Her camera finds mushrooms in intimate acts of becoming: solitary, clustered, split open, dissolving. These fruiting bodies echo the human body — soft, textured, erupting through the soil — but they resist allegory. They are not symbols of production, but figures of transformation. Like the women in her images and text, they thrive not despite decay, but through it.
“She no longer bleeds,” the text reads, “but she dreams more vividly now.” Throughout the book, we meet a female figure who is no longer defined by what she produces. She gathers the detritus of her life — memory, scent, loss, knowledge — and steps into a new phase: not disappearance, but reconfiguration. Her body, once described in terms of loss, becomes a space of quiet power. Peeling an orange barefoot in a cold kitchen — this, too, is survival. This, too, is a kind of freedom.
Fruiting Bodies proposes an alternate ecofeminist vision — one where mycelium, not lineage, becomes the metaphor: vast, unseen, connective. Where post-reproductive life is not an end, but a fertile ground of memory, community, and resistance. Like mushrooms emerging in damp morning light, the power here lies in what is hidden, tender, and continuous.
