Humans crave connection with nature that cities disconnect us from. Graphic Rewilding proves that art is a viable alternative, or even enhancer of, ecological spaces.
Sides of buildings in cities around the world have been getting a makeover. Entire facades, sometimes many storeys tall, brought to life with vibrant depictions of local plants in an array of colours. In a grey urban world devoid of ecology, the art of Catherine Borowski and Lee Baker brings nature into urban environments, often where there is a lack of green space.
This is the work of Graphic Rewilding, a UK-based artistic practice specialising in large-scale images of flora. Their style is unmistakable. Inspired by Japanese painting and culture, their images stand out for their bold lines and even bolder hues. And, of course, for their incredible size.
Megaliths of Art
The scale of Graphic Rewilding’s art cannot be overstated. When they first started out, the pair were prepared to emblazon their images on buildings the size of cathedrals or train stations. Lee says their capability matches their ambition in the way captured by a saying attributed to Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
In 2024, they got the chance to prove they can, by projecting a digital animated piece onto all 220 metres of the Tianfu International Finance Center twin towers in Chengdu, China. It’s an “actual skyscraper,” Catherine says. “That’s a once in a lifetime piece of work.”
The commission, for the world mental health campaign of sportswear brand Lulumemon, also saw the pair “doing huge public art installations across the whole of China”, including a transformation of the interior, exterior, and rooftop of a flagship store. “That was a total meeting of minds in terms of aesthetics, but also philosophy behind our work,” she explains.
A Question of Scale
Commissions in China and to an extent the USA seem not to have the “limitations to scale” that’s more common in Europe, Lee tells us, where projects are more often determined by “budgetary limitations and also I think conceptual limitations as well”. Not that this holds them back. A brief look at the Graphic Rewilding website reveals that they have done plenty of installations on home turf in the UK (from London, to Hereford, Manchester, Cardiff, and East Sussex), as well as in cities throughout mainland Europe: pop-up flower clouds and street interventions in Berlin, Germany; rotating floral scenes on the side of the Design Museum of Barcelona, Spain.
If someone said, do Wembley Stadium, we’d be like, “Yeah, fine”.
Lee Baker
They’re not all huge, though. “For me and Catherine, one of our favourite pieces was actually in Rome, and it was tiny.” A room in a Renaissance museum barely big enough to cram in seven people, Catherine says. “But it meant that we had the opportunity to do the floor and the walls and the arches. I think that’s possibly my favourite work we’ve done.” It’s not the scale that excites them most, but the immersive experience.
More Than a Visualisation
That’s apt, as their artwork is a depiction of nature, which is a real-life three-dimensional immersive experience.
Using the urban environment as their canvas, Graphic Rewilding’s designs take on an organic formation, melding to the idiosyncratic shape of buildings in a similar way that real flora adapts to its surroundings – wild or human-made, feral or manicured.
This hints at another of Graphic Rewilding’s purposes, other than simply looking good. As a form of placemaking or beautification, art plays a significant role in improving the liveability of cities. It gives communities a sense of pride and can be a factor in local identity – how people relate to and take ownership of a space.
This is something that always flabbergasts me. We never get our work vandalized.
Catherine Borowski
Nowhere was this more obvious than in Crawley, where they installed wall and floor vistas and decorated street furniture in their distinctive style.
Many residents in the area work at London’s Gatwick airport and faced mass unemployment in 2020 due to the COVID-19 shutdown – the kind of blow to a community that can lead to disillusionment and civil unease. But the images of nature appear to have been quite healing. “We had a piece of work that was just meant to be there for three months, and I think it lasted nearly four years and it never once got vandalized or tagged or graffiti onto,” Catherine recalls.
Public Art is a Public Process
One explanation for the people of Crawley’s respect for good quality art is that they were involved in its creation.
Public engagement has crept into the artist’s list of required skillsets in recent years, which not everyone is ready for or enjoys.
“What you find nowadays with artists, is they have to be experts in everything,” Catherine explains. “So you find that curators and developers will expect a brilliant artist to be good at finance, good at fabrication, an expert at talking to people – and performing, because you’ve then got to give talks. And I would say the majority of artists just don’t have that skillset.”
This can be a significant barrier to winning commissions, especially via open calls, impacting their livelihood.
Tricks of the Trade
Graphic Rewilding has figured out a way to make it work for them. “A really simple thing we do is to create really good quality postcards with our flowers on. And we just do door drops with a call to action asking people to DM [send a direct message] with the name or a photo of their favourite flower or draw it if they don’t know the name. And we then redraw it and incorporate those results into our work.” It’s what they did in Crawley and a process they repeated “down in Royal Docks” in the summer of 2025. Very little personal interaction is required but people feel included, heard. Although they do have face-to-faces occasionally. Catherine and Lee have stints visiting “community centres and mosques and libraries, just chatting to people, asking them what their favourite flowers are,” she adds.
Public interface of any kind is crucial to their work, because the flowers they print are always meaningful in a local context, Lee explains. “We don’t just generate any old flowers. They are very site specific.”
Geographically, yes – an upcoming installation in Phoenix, Arizona, for example features cacti – but not only.
“If we’re in a multicultural environment, we’re trying to represent people’s flowers from their homes or from their religion or from what they loved in the past.” It is about a personal connection that evokes a feeling; it relates to people’s imprint of nature and evokes a sense of familiarity, pleasure, and calm.
Origins of Graphic Rewilding
The concept of Graphic Rewilding’s massive prints feels unique, and the story of how it came about is as organic as the flowers that the duo love to paint.
Catherine was running a placemaking agency for almost 20 years, where, one day, a client handed them a brief for a large public art piece in Northwest London. Lee was the company’s creative director, but Catherine knew that he painted flowers inspired by Japanese art and culture in his personal art practice. Together, they decided to take these designs and blow them up to scale.
My practice has often been about nature through a human lens; a fascination with how human beings see nature, how human beings perceive and enjoy nature.
Lee Baker
It resonated widely, Catherine recalls. So much, in fact, that it had an unexpected impact on the pair. “We just adored the whole process that we both binned everything else off. We decided this is our future. So that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.”
As a creative pair, part of the attraction was finally being able to decide for themselves which jobs to take on, whereas with the placemaking agency they had less, well, agency.
Now they could finally concentrate on “truly getting to the heart of what we believe in with urban art, what we want to do, stuff that challenges the public but is an interesting kind of viewpoint,” Lee says.
So they opened a gallery in a skip.
The Skip Gallery
Like the Skip Garden in King’s Cross, the gallery was made to be mobile. “The original idea was to dump a skip outside Frieze” – a contemporary art fair. But over the next seven years the idea developed, collaborating with artists like Gavin Turk and David Shrigley, and showing, 24 times, in different well-known public spaces in London, Milan, Rotterdam, and New York.
Catherine says that she and Lee got a taste for art that does “not have any rules and not have any regulations around” it, which buoyed up their confidence to “blow these [flowers] up absolutely massive”.
During the downtime of COVID lockdown, Lee taught himself to create 3D digital visualisations to project what Graphic Rewilding’s pieces could look like.
I was able to visualize our true vision, which was we want this as big as a cathedral. We want this as big as a skyscraper, so let’s just visualise it and see what happens.
Lee Baker
These renderings were enough to win them their first commission, to wrap an entire building in Primrose Hill to veil construction work. It was reminiscent of the pair’s shared inspiration: artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. “They, to us, are the pinnacle of public art,” Lee tells us.
The influence of Van Gogh is also plain to see in their style – although unlike the irises and sunflowers of the Dutch master, their prints rarely use the original colours. They were in their element when New York Botanical Gardens asked them to do an exhibition interpreting his famous works. “That was incredible because it was merging our love of Van Gogh and really looking into how he’s changed people’s lives,” Catherine says.
Art Therapy
Graphic Rewilding is touching the lives of people too. They believe, understandably, that their artwork is a much needed remedy for urban mental health issues.
Cities are a hotbed for poor wellbeing caused by high exposure to noise and other sensory overload, air pollution, crime, and various other repercussions that are part and parcel of dense inhabitation.
The Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health claims that this concoction of undesirables contributes to “an almost 40% higher risk of depression” than in rural areas, “over 20% more anxiety, and double the risk of schizophrenia, in addition to more loneliness, isolation and stress”.
Contact with nature can ease those pressures. A whopping ten million people responded positively in studies connecting ecology and mood. The Mental Health Foundation reports that “nature can generate many positive emotions, such as calmness, joy, and creativity and can facilitate concentration”.
But not everyone has easy access to nature. And as urban sprawl eats away at the natural world and populations continue to rise, the deficit continues to extend. The average human already lives six miles away from a natural space; publicly-accessible green space is thought to cover as little as 3% of the surface area of a majority of European cities.
There are so many lifestyle and access barriers that strain our connection with nature too, Catherine explains. “If you have accessibility issues or you’ve got young kids, or you don’t want to get your trainers dirty, or you can’t even get to the woods because you don’t have a car, or whatever. So what we do is, try and bring some nature to the people.”
Nature: The Original Masterpiece
While Catherine and Lee don’t deny that there’s no substitute for the real thing, research supports the hypothesis that engaging with art can be beneficial for mental health, and simply looking at images of nature where there’s an ecological deficit can be highly effective. Even scenes of ecology on social media – widely panned as being detrimental to mental health – seem to improve viewer’s moods.
“When you see a great piece of art that you absolutely respond to, it leaps over intellect, it leaps over the thought process and gets to somewhere in, I’m going to call it, your soul,” Lee says. (He talks more about the almost instinctive response we have to art in an online recording titled Hack Your Happiness Levels in 20 Minutes.)
Catherine agrees. “Art can be inspirational. It can transport you into another world in your imagination.” In an urban environment where ecology is hardly anywhere to be seen, nature in art can plug a gap exacerbated by a lack of funds, expertise, or willingness to green a neighbourhood.
Cities have roads, cities have buildings. Not every inch of those buildings and roads can be greened.
Lee Baker
Art that Feels Like Home
It seems to tap into a precious childlike wonder for the world. Catherine says her now teenage son will still stop and look at a ladybird or a daisy he sees on a walk, whereas adults seem not to notice.
“What we find is, if we zone in on those elements of nature and blow them up massive, it makes adults reconsider their own environment in a new way or look at their city with new eyes.”
In their home city of London, our CityChangers rented billboards and replicated a meadow of sorts showing regional flowers like irises, bluebells, rose bay, and willow herb. “That’s almost like our gift to the city where we grew up,” Catherine reflects. “Almost like a love letter to our childhood. Really giving something to people who are sitting on the top of a bus.”
But the two different takes – art and nature – are not mutually exclusive. Art can actually enhance existing green spaces. “We’ve seen it work really well,” Lee reports. “If you are able to create a patch which is nature based, why not enhance the wall behind it with images of nature?”
That’s what happened in Cleveland, Ohio: Graphic Rewilding were asked to add a backdrop to the rooftop garden of a children’s hospital, creating “a very beautiful space” to aid patients’ convalescence.
Large-scale Challenges
Printing at such sizes clearly comes with complications – not least because either the scale, shape, or material of the print can be a new experiment each time.
In March 2026 they opened a new installation in New York City, opposite Ground Zero, which took on an opaque stained glass effect for the first time. But that wasn’t as much of an issue as the unprecedented fourth blizzard of the season.
Sometimes the weather means outside jobs come with added stress. The prints, once transported into place, have to be laid down prior to being affixed in place. That requires the ground to be bone dry.
There are other issues, Catherine says, from collaborating across time zones “to not being given the right structural information” upfront. Their engineers “can only do their job if the information they’re given exists or is correct”. On occasions, they’ve been waiting for details up to the eleventh hour.
We’ve been in situations where, the day before fabrication, we still don’t have the information.
Catherine Borowski
“It always works out,” Catherine laughs. “And it’s really good fun. The main thing is we will make a difference to people’s lives, even on a micro level, and that makes us happy.”
Happy. So yes, nature in art does impact mental wellbeing, even for the artist. And in more ways than one.
Catherine and Lee have no plans to stop now, they’re enjoying Graphic Rewilding too much, and they don’t take that for granted, Catherine tells us. “How many people get to love their job?” And how many people have a job that produces what so many others love?