Most artists order their art supplies online. Lily Brown ’26 heads out to the woods.

Lily creates original, living mandalas nurtured from mushroom spores. Those spores grew into something even bigger last month, when she presented both her artwork and a paper at Harvard University.

She spoke at the Spirituality and the Arts conference, hosted by Harvard Divinity School. The four-day event explored the relationship between alternative spirituality and artistic practice.

Religious Studies and Ethics Professor Eric Mortensen also presented at the conference.

Lily’s paper, “Emptiness as Form: A Mycelial Mandala,” examined themes of ecological spiritual art, contemporary mandala practice, indigeneity and cultural appropriation, and interconnected communication within landscapes. She describes her art as an ecological metaphor for the interconnectedness expressed in the Buddhist concept of emptiness

Her framed works reveal the mycelial network—a vast underground web of fungal strands that connect plants and trees in a mutually beneficial ecosystem.

Lily cultivated her art earlier this year and credits the Heart Sutra, a foundational text in Mahayana Buddhism, as inspiration. “It guided my artistic vision,” she says.

“It was really awesome to present,” Lily adds. “I was a little intimidated at first, but the more I wrote and researched, the less that was true.”

Eric’s paper, “Pictographs, Efficacy, Power, & The Wonder of it All: Linguistic Art and Naxi Religious Memory in Southwest China,” draws on his decades of folk-religious fieldwork in the region. During the conference, he also served as a guest teacher.