The WHY behind Graphic Rewilding
In 2019 studies appearing in Frontiers in Psychology showed that a 20 minute walk in nature is enough to significantly improve your mood and reduce feelings of stress and anxiety. A walk in nature improves your mood, but it’s also been shown that exposure to PICTURES of nature has a similar effect...
Patients who have images of nature in hospital waiting rooms have lower levels of stress and anxiety. Viewing nature images increases activity in brain regions associated with attention and emotion regulation, as well as increased alpha-wave activity associated with relaxation and meditative states.
Photo by Mark Cocksedge
The truth is that even a super simple image of a painted flower can not only have a huge impact on your emotions and happiness levels, it can also raise far more profound existential questions about your perception of the world than we thought possible. When you look at a painted flower, you’re not just seeing the colours and shapes that objectively tell you it is a painting of a flower, you’re also, no matter how subtly, interpreting what it represents. You may see the flower as a symbol of beauty, growth, innocence, love, desire or even the ephemeral nature of existence, depending on the lens of your own biases and beliefs, which often come from cultural conditioning.
Before the 18th Century here in the West, if you’d said that a walk in nature was good for you, you’d have probably been laughed at or guided to the nearest sanitarium. Back then nature was often frightening, to be endured and survived. The Bible said that mountains were the detritus of creation, and when forced to travel across the Alps, a Welsh priest, called Adam of Usk asked to be blindfolded so as not to be witness to these horrendous aberrations, and others described the Alps as nature's boils, blisters and warts, and even called the peaks the "Devil's arse" and "Nature's genitals.”
The point is that even though our brain has, as neuroscientist, Anjeen Chatterjee put it, ‘been sculpted by nature and is tightly coupled to the environment’, our minds can still be easily swayed by culture, education, and life circumstance. And even though we all rightly assume that exposure to nature is good for us and makes us happy, the forces of evolution that have kept us tightly coupled to nature for millennia have become more and more strained through factors such as urbanisation.
Before the juggernaut of urbanisation came along to remodel the planet beyond recognition, one evolutionary theory that explains why we find nature and flowers so uplifting is that for approximately 6–7 million years our hunter-gather ancestors analysed the landscape for ‘fitness indicators’, because they wanted to be well fed and avoid being the food. The safe places to settle tended to have trees to shelter from the sun or escape from sabre tooth tigers (I’m not actually sure there were sabre tooth tigers), they had water sources, open spaces, distant horizon views, and flowers to act like beacons, signalling that an area was healthy and would have good foraging in the near future.
Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo
But, jump forward a few million years, and the start of the industrial revolution led to the rapid growth of urbanisation and significantly changed our living environments. In 1700 only 3% of the world’s population lived in urban areas, and now that is nearly 60%. This will increase to 85% by 2100. From 18 million city dwellers in 1700 to 9 billion by 2100. And here in Europe more than 60% of city dwellers live in areas with insufficient green space and of those, by far the largest proportion are, unsurprisingly, from lower incomes and ethnic minorities.
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So, as an artistic counterbalance to this severe lack of green space in cities, we co-founded Graphic Rewilding, in order to create vast, flower inspired, maximalist, attention grabbing, positivity inducing artworks in often-overlooked urban spaces. Our vibrant images of nature are set in opposition to the grey concrete jungle, and though these obviously could never provide the same environmental and psychological benefits as real nature, we want to inspire people to connect and empathise a little more with the natural world, hopefully mitigating some of the negative effects of a lack of exposure to green space.
As an example, early on with Graphic Rewilding we created a project inspired by victorian pleasure gardens on some unused asphalted land on a busy road in London. This was a blend of art and planting and as soon as we opened it to the public, people flooded in and used the space, to play, to eat their lunch, to relax. People said that there was hardly any public green space in the area and that even our theatrical garden was a hugely welcome addition to their community. But this isn’t isolated, we see this reaction time and time again.
Photo by Graham Fudger
My personal awakening to happiness through nature and a more biophilic sensibility came, over the years, weirdly through my passion for nature in ART: paintings, prints, graphic design, tattoos, textile design, tv, social media but also, believe it or not, through Video Games. I can’t tell you how relaxing I have find it wandering, often on horseback, through epic landscapes of games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Ghost of Tsushima. Imagine, during a high speed supercar race in the game Gran Tourismo, pulling over on a lay-by just to take a look at the stormy sunset on the horizon. Ridiculous right? But tests have proved that people who are exposed to nature in VR and Video Games experience lower levels of stress and higher levels of positivity compared to those who are exposed to virtual urban environments.
Horizon Zero Dawn / Sony Interactive Entertainment
I’m certainly not proposing this as a replacement for nature, but I just want to illustrate that our brains can be hacked to suspend disbelief and accept that though we are not interacting with real trees, rocks, or animals, we are psychologically benefitting from a totally imagined nature scenario. Graphic Rewilding is an expression of this surrogate connection to nature and an attempt to understand my own paradoxical fascination with nature in unnatural environments.
Even though our compositions are whimsical caricatures, with cartoonish black lines, over saturated colours, with no perspective or background - according to neauroaesthetic theory - your brain still immediately reads these images as ‘flowers’, and generates the positive associations i’ve been talking about.
I’m an artist, but our Graphic Rewilding projects are fuelled by intense curiosity and a strong desire to hack people’s happiness by connecting with bold images of nature at ‘eye level’.
I hope your interest has been sparked, and next time you are having a walk in a wildflower meadow, staring mindfully at a screensaver, looking at a Van Gogh painting of sunflowers, trying on a bright floral dress, or running through the virtual forests of Red Dead Redemption 2, you’ll remember Graphic Rewilding and smile.
