“Pollution Palace,” (2023), Zhuhai, China. All images © Sam Wilde, shared with permission
“For generations, we have been taught to bear the responsibility of keeping nature in its most untouched and purest form, but try as we might, Pandora’s box has been opened,” says London-based artist and designer Sam Wilde. His striking illustrations and public artworks portray an imagined world “where we just let everything go awry.”
Wilde, who as an undergraduate studied biology and conservation, is gripped by the realities of the climate crisis and the human impact on the planet. The British countryside, for example, famous for its verdant bucolic vistas, is rife with invasive and non-native flora and fauna. Due to agriculture, industry, and other human interventions, the vast majority of the U.K. has no true natural landscape at all.
“I think with maturity, I began to understand that, for the most-part, we each as individuals are all doing the best we can to look after the planet,” Wilde tells Colossal. “And ultimately, the blame lies in the macro—and not the micro choices—we each make day-to-day.”
Employing a lurid array of uncanny shapes like glowing flowers or mutated fruits, Wilde considers an alternate future when the environment as we know it has entirely vanished. He upends the concept of natural beauty by considering the artificial instead, “framing the question: could there be a kind of punk beauty to that?” he says. In two major public artworks, “Pollution Palace” and “Cat’s Charade,” both commissioned for municipalities in China, he envisions worlds turned upside-down where reality seems at odds with one’s surroundings.
“Pollution Palace” at night
Wilde is fascinated by the way we perceive beauty or pleasure and how the brain doesn’t distinguish a hierarchy between artificial and natural objects. He says:
It’s hard to articulate, but if we, say, look at a lava lamp, it feels enchanting and visually appealing and fires up our synapses with endorphins. And then by the same stroke, if we look at a big beautiful juicy melon, on a neurochemical level, it’s no doubt the same nervous system pathways being activated by that visual stimulation… And that’s what I’m trying to evoke with my works, stripping out the judgement/fear/anxiety around the manmade,and just for a moment escaping into a world where manmade and nature are one of the same.
In “Cat’s Charade,” inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, vibrant patterns redolent of radioactive flowers and a giant feline installed on top of a building instill a sense of delirium. And in “Pollution Palace,” monumental inflatable sculptures shaped like hybrid pineapples and leggy blooms glow preternaturally at night. The installation takes as a starting point the tree of knowledge of good and evil, in the garden of Eden, reframing that knowledge as a tension between the organic and the human-made.
Wilde experiments with different techniques and types of projects, which range from watercolor paintings to digital illustration to textile designs. Explore more of his work on his website and Behance, and follow him on Instagram for updates.
“Cat’s Charade”
Left: “Pollution Palace” at night. Right: Installation view of “Cat’s Charade” (2023), Whuan, China
“Hubris Tree: Evergreen” (2019)
Work in progress for “Hubris Tree” (2019)
“Pollution Palace”
“Pollution Palace”
Work in progress for “Hubris Tree”
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article In Large-Scale Installations, Sam Wilde Imagines a Post-Natural Future in Lurid Color appeared first on Colossal.
