Da Voar Draw - Day 13 — Aimee Labourne

It's Day 13 of Da Voar Draw, and today we're taking inspiration from the mysterious world of Lichens!

Lichens are everywhere but you might not ever have noticed them before! They are abundant on natural outdoor surfaces including rocks, trees, peat, soil - but equally cover buildings and other human-made constructions.

Lichens are strange slow-growing organisms, and the result of a 'symbiotic' relationship between microscopic algae and fungi. Various species of lichen sometimes even grow together, covering outdoor surfaces in patterns and colours from an other-worldly micro-ecosystem. They vary very little through the seasons also, and are the oldest living things*; they are life-forms that exist on a different level of time than ours.

Throughout Da Voar Draw, we've looked at subjects that we often think of as 'purely' from the natural world. We all too often seek to rationally divide the worlds of nature and humans. But (as we'll explore in these final two days of Da Voar Draw) we are not separate or outside of nature, but entangled and inseparable from its processes. As lichen's prove, our world is highly interconnected. Human-made buildings do not stay clean for long, but are soon taken over by forces of change and decay, and by organisms - all which do not differentiate between human and non-human-other.

*'Lichens', J.Laundon. 1986. Shire Publications.