Jodie Goldring’s installation ‘Dining with Cordyceps’ lures us into a trance with the cordycep’s eerie beauty before revealing the predatory nature of the fungi. Goldring collaborates with basketmakers Barbara Hawkins and Sue Dilley in this stunning exhibition to highlight her concern with the “insidious changes to our domestic environment and consumption habits over the last century”. Using waste materials such as plastic bread bags and tree roots, her recreation of the domestic dining room draws attention to ramifications of consumerism and how it crumbles the domestic environment.

A parasite, the cordycep is a fungus that infects and kills its host insect. Once fruited, it produces spores to infect another healthy insect.

As you sweep through the installation, an awed silence is cast over you as you move around the defunct dining room. The walls hang three scenery paintings. Like fingers, the cordyceps violently protrude from the paintings, groping for a new host. They reach towards the dining room table. Sprouting with slender, bright orange forms, the table no longer serves food for a family. It is weak and crumbling, covered in tiny holes, about to collapse.

Once dead, the cordyceps prey on the chairs. Goldring contrasts a chair in the earlier stage of infection to an obsolete chair. The obsolete chairs can no longer be sat upon: two tall tendrils stick up proudly, its blue and pink colour glowing against the dull brown of the wood. The other chairs show tufts of mould on the seat, slowly deteriorating.

The fire mantle is painted a ghostly white, dotted with brown to recreate the same crumbling effect as the chairs and table, emphasising its decay. On the surface, the cordyceps look stunning against the white. However, underneath the mantle is a tangle of sinister roots. In fact, under all the furniture lies an underground of menacing roots, from fat bulbs to disturbing shrunken, stomach-like sacs.

Goldring creates a scene that is hypnotizing to watch but utterly petrifying once under the cordycep’s trance. The cordyceps represent the by-product of our thrift driven consumerist society. Our constant need for the new and replaceable quickens the demise of the home environment. Both tables and chairs prove necessary in the home: it is where we gather and share our day. It is now nothing but waste.