Super Bloom at Desert Botanical Garden: Inspirations and Installations
Two years ago we started dreaming about a desert we’d never really known. Graphic Rewilding is a shared art practice born in the grey and the rain of the UK - a world away from the Sonoran Desert landscape of Phoenix Arizona.
So we came to walk the trails, learn from DBG’s botanists, and see the plants that make this part of the world so unique. We 3D scanned the entire site, mapping every bend in every path, every bench, every terrace - so that wherever we were in the world, we could design as though we were standing there ourselves.
What we found at DBG were plants like nothing we had seen before; flowers that wait for darkness to bloom, families of species that have found a way to not just survive some of the harshest conditions on Earth, but to shine whilst doing it. We spent months researching the flora of the Sonoran Desert, and matching specific pollinators to each plant to spotlight their symbiotic relationships.
Super Bloom is what two years of this obsession looks like and it is the biggest exhibition we have ever made. The show isn’t simply one installation in one gallery, it’s a full scale takeover of the garden itself. Wander the trails and you won’t know what you’ll find around the next corner, an avenue of flags that ask you to look up to the sky, a glass house catching the light and scattering colour to the ground, a Flower Cloud waiting for you to take a seat. Every piece has been designed site-specifically, informed by DBG’s own architecture, the seating and winding paths. This is a show that is designed to be discovered, in the sunlight and also at night.
At the centre of the exhibition is our series of tailor made glass houses, which represent the core of our art practice, taking something recognisable, something overlooked, and transforming it into something wondrous. We tested methods again and again to perfect our glass prints, finding a way to ensure colour floods through when the sunlight hits. These works depend on the sun in the same way the desert itself does - meaning each visit throughout the day provides a different experience to those physically present. By night, the glass houses glow from within, turning them into jewel-like beacons that invite you inside the art itself.
Scattered through the garden, we have developed our Flower Cloud concept to incorporate the existing infrastructure, and drawn directly from the plants growing in the ground around them - so each feels truly at home in its surroundings. If the glass houses are designed to encourage movement, the Flower Clouds are your invitation to slow down and take a seat.
Moving inside the RAF Gallery, there is a whole nother world to explore: an immersive installation of light and sound champions the Queen of the Night - one of the desert’s most secretive flowers - that blooms as darkness falls and lasts for only a single night before wilting by sunrise.
This exhibition has pushed our practice further than ever before; many new plant species, new demands on materials’ thermotolerance and a new way to move through and interact with our work. More than anything, Superbloom is a show of exploration and discovery, built in partnership with one of the most respected botanical institutions in the US. Superbloom stands as a monument to the plants themselves, and everything they teach up about surviving, and shining, against the odds.
