This Place, Here: How Site Specificity Shapes Every Project
Working across the world in endlessly different contexts, every Graphic Rewilding artwork arrives with its own particular set of demands and possibilities. But however different the space, climate or brief, they all begin with the same question: "what does this place actually need?" It sounds like a soft question until you try to answer it, but actually it is the most demanding part of the work.
Our artistic practice is driven by site specificity - not in the sense only that the art should fit a particular wall, but in the deeper sense that it could not exist anywhere else. The work is rooted in place, grown out of its architecture, the light, its history and the evolution of the landscape that it belongs to - the plants telling the story of the site, in a way that nothing else can.
The process of creating starts long before any drawing actually begins. Lidar scans of the space, photographs taken at every angle, video walkthroughs and measurements must all be taken, allowing us to entirely rebuild the site in 3D software, with the sun’s position modelled across the day so we can feel how the light moves through the space at any point through the year. We place virtual cameras at eye level to test the experience of our viewer, their first encounter with the artwork, how the composition shifts from day to night - all before a single flower is drawn. Only once the space is truly understood does the research begin that will give the work its true meaning.
Flowers are never a decorative choice: they are the biography of a place, told botanically, and the question they ask is not just what grows here now but what has always grown here, what arrived centuries ago and quietly became native, what a resident's grandmother planted in her garden, what seeds blew in from somewhere else and stayed. Sometimes the answer is in archives. Sometimes it comes from connecting with the local community, and every answer adds another layer to the portrait of the place.
That layered portrait is where the work finds its particular kind of generosity, because flowers are one of the most universal languages we have; they cross age, background and culture without needing explanation. Both a child and a botanist can stand in front of the same wall and both find something to meet them. The work is fun, colourful and accessible, and it doesn't announce itself as educational, but it carries real knowledge inside it. The aim is to reflect the flowers back to the communities that live alongside them and quietly invite curiosity about the natural world without ever demanding it. It is a door left open rather than a lesson delivered, and in that openness it becomes something else too - a way discovering how rich and strange and various the world's flora really is, and how much of it most of us walk past every day without quite noticing.
The Lewes Castle installation, Majesty & Diversity, makes this most explicit: Lewes sits at a point of immense strategic significance, commanding the River Ouse between the English Channel and the Sussex interior, and for centuries it was a gateway - for warriors, traders, invaders and settlers - with every wave of people carrying seeds, bulbs, cuttings and rootstock, intentionally or accidentally, transforming the British landscape permanently and incrementally.
As Maggie Campbell-Culver writes in The Origin of Plants, “as the last ice age retreated, the British Isles had the smallest range of flora and fauna in the world. Even by year 1000 we had only a few hundred indigenous plants.” The extraordinary diversity of the British countryside today is the direct result of a thousand years of cultural exchange, and the flowers chosen for Lewes hold that entire history inside them. Round Headed Rampion - the Pride of Sussex - is genuinely native, but the Common Poppy arrived from Asia, buttercups from the Middle East, yarrow from Eurasia, Yellow Wort from the Mediterranean Basin, Scarlet Pimpernel from West Asia and North Africa, Viper's Bugloss from Asia and Europe, Common Fumitory from Eurasia and Africa. To stand in front of the work is to stand in front of a portrait of Britain as it actually is: layered, travelled and made immeasurably richer by every culture that passed through or put down roots, and at a moment of increasing global diaspora, celebrating that felt not just relevant but necessary.
The same principle runs through every project, applied differently each time according to what the place asks for. Berlin's Potsdamer Platz received magnolias, cherry blossoms, cornflowers, buttercups, daisies and tansy in our installation The Fleeting Opulence of Spring. These are the flowers a Berliner half-notices on the way to the U-Bahn, plants that arrived from elsewhere over generations and became so woven into the city that they feel indistinguishable from it now.
Cornwall’s Eden Project received viper's bugloss, bluebells, oxeye daisy, wild daffodil, meadow buttercup, red clover, tufted vetch, wild garlic and red campion - a Cornish wildflower meadow highlighted, translated and scaled up to maximalist size.
At University Hospitals Cleveland the site was a rooftop therapy garden for children facing cancer, where our larger than life flowers, butterflies, dragonflies and bees were integrated with real planting chosen by landscape gardeners; the art making no attempt to compete with the living plants but doing a different job in the same space, with the same story about the natural world running quietly through both.
In Crawley, a town genuinely devastated by Gatwick Airport's closure during the pandemic, our artwork was commissioned for three months - the street’s walls, floors, benches, billboards, and even bins wrapped in the same colourful flora - but three months became three years, because nobody wanted it taken down and, perhaps most tellingly, not a single piece was vandalised in all that time. That sense of belonging is ultimately what our whole careful, thorough process is working towards.
Getting there is slow work. Compositional thinking is where the hardest decisions live; vector drawing is repetitive execution, but the judgement about where to place a thirty-five-metre chrysanthemum, what angle a viewer first encounters it from, how it reads at dusk, whether it speaks to the column behind it or fights with it - that is where the actual work happens, in weeks of redrawing individual flowers and days of digital flower-arranging, tuning and adjusting until something shifts and the piece finally feels like it has settled into its site.
There is no shortcut for that, and there probably shouldn't be, because it's the underlying logic that makes everything else come together. At the heart of that logic is always the same understanding: that a place's flora is its biography, a record of who came, from where, and when, of what the land has absorbed and made its own across centuries. The art we create makes that biography visible, colourful, accessible, open to everyone, and quietly full of wonder at the astonishing natural world we all share.
