We sat down with Andrew J Millar recently and found ourselves, not entirely surprisingly, talking about mushrooms. Not just mushrooms, of course. We talked about trees communicating through their roots, bees navigating by sound and movement, and the idea that everything around us is in conversation, if only we would listen. This is the world Andrew inhabits, and it bleeds directly into his work.

Andrew has always been playful. When he first started working with polaroid film he'd experiment with collage and layering, it has always been in his nature to approach his practice with curiosity. For a time his focus was portraiture and the female form but it was the pandemic that gave him the freedom to step back and really question his artistic identity. "You don't have to have a box, you should be involved in your own creativity", he says.

For Andrew, the creative relief of the pandemic also marked the beginning of a deeper personal shift. Andrew started to experiment with psychedelics, and found himself drawn towards nature, philosophy, consciousness, questions about the self and our connection to the world. He moved away from the figure and towards the landscape.

Andrew loves to travel and Iceland has long been a touchstone. "Iceland just really hit, it's this weird juxtaposition of active volcanoes and peace", he says. He goes to soak it all in, the rhythmic light, the natural layers of landscape, and lets it percolate in his practice when he returns to the UK. At home he works from a studio in his attic, but in the warmer months he's outside as much as possible, reading, thinking and letting his ideas form slowly.

Slowness is important to Andrew. He feels the need "to pivot back into old resources, it's a requirement."

There's something grounding in returning to analogue proccesses, to a skilled artisanal approach that is neither immediate nor easy. Andrew also likes to play with experimental approaches to more traditional techniques. He uses a bass speaker to create caustic light and photographs it. He plays with sunlight reflections, notices spiders in the garden and brings them into the image through delicate hand finishing. He goes into a meditative space when he works. "I am as loose as I possibly can be. That's the key: letting your mind drift. Try your best to retain that little mishap at the end."

Screen printing is large part of Andrew's process. He scales his photographs into large screen prints that he works back into.

Andrew is also drawn to natural medicine and pagan tradition, that pull towards the other, the unseen. It gives his work a quality of concealment and means it acts as a peek behind the curtain.

This brings us back to the mushrooms.

At his 6 week solo show 'Hidden Visions' at the Saatchi Gallery, Andrew created an installation called the Mycena. Mushrooms grew out of batteries. A copper mat on the floor meant visitors could place their hands on it, their biometrics feeding into the mushrooms, the mushrooms feeding back into a synthesiser, the synthesiser into a TV monitor that translated their movement into the movement of the mycelium.

Andrew stood back and watched people find themselves in the artwork. "The idea that someone will have a feeling from seeing this, that's very beautiful." That moment of someone finding their own way into a piece is what he is after.

For Andrew, this is what it all comes back to. "Everything is talking," he says. "Everything has its own way of communicating. Mushrooms relate to one another, the roots of trees communicate, bees are equally in tune with sound and movement. As soon as we open up to the idea that we are not the only ones in communication, and that our communication can extend beyond our own species, then the world becomes so open."

Andrew's work is, at its heart, about trying to capture a moment, not just visually but truthfully. "You can't get the feeling in the photo so you change the photo so it is truer to the feeling and not the image." The layers, the processes, the gold and the emulsion, all of it in service of something that photography alone cannot hold. Andrew J Millar is trying to get at that thing. And in doing so, he's asking us to feel it too.