Terra Plume, Katie St. Clair’s exhibition of new paintings at the University of Maine at Augusta’s Charles Danforth Gallery, took viewers into one of nature’s most hidden realms: the secret underworld of mushrooms that connect forest root-systems.

St. Clair's new series of works, mostly painted in early 2020 when she was an artist-in-residence at the Penland School of Craft and shown for the first time in Terra Plume, explored the complexity between the mushroom’s seen and unseen structures. “When we think of mushrooms, we think of the cap as the mushroom, but that’s actually not the organism, which moves underground...this massive, unseen, almost magical thing that’s all around us, that exists without our knowing,” St. Clair explained.

The exhibition included nearly thirty new paintings.