Dead Gods is conceived as a living monument honoring prehistoric interspecies as sacred deities. Created by Jemila MacEwan—a conceptual artist whose durational works and installations draw upon geological, ecological, and evolutionary processes—the sculptures are made of fungi mycelium. In scale and presence, they invoke Prototaxites, an extinct genus of towering, trunk-like organisms that inhabited Earth between 420 and 375 million years ago. They are understood by scientists to make up an entirely distinct kingdom of organisms that once enabled the proliferation of life on Earth. By creating this work, MacEwan recalls a time long before the human-caused mass extinction of animal and plant species.

Jemila MacEwan is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in New York. They were born in Scotland to Sufi parents, and immigrated to Australia as a child, where their upbringing intertwined scientific, mythological and spiritual ways of learning from the land. MacEwan is known for their intimately interwoven earthworks, created through slow acts of physical endurance and meditation. The artist cultivates kinships with landscapes and their communities of indwellers, regarding them as true collaborators who carry their own valid subjectivities, histories, and messages. Their work is empathetic to the psychological pressure of trying to reach into the past to regain control of a future fraught with uncertainty.

MacEwan was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures/Design, The Philip Hunter Environmental Art Fellowship, The BigCi Environmental Award and is a TEDxBoston Planetary Fellow. They have presented work internationally including at; ARoS Museum (Denmark), The Australian Consulate-General (NYC), Pioneer Works (NYC), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NYC), Cambridge University (UK), and Skaftfell Center (Iceland). The artist has been invited to attend notable residencies including; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (USA), Art OMI (USA), Yaddo (USA), BANFF Center (Canada), NARS Foundation (NYC), Ox-Bow School of Painting (MI) and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (NYC). Their work has been published in Art in America, Boston Globe, The Washington Post, SFMoMA Open Space, Hyperallergic, MONDO arc, and Artist Profile Magazine. MacEwan has been generously supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Australia Council for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Ian Potter Cultural Council and is a recipient of The Marten Bequest Traveling Scholarship.

This project was made possible through the generous support of the Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Art Grant and the Foundation for Contemporary Art.