blooming in spring
Houston development blossoms with colorful installation from U.K. artists
Graphic Rewilding (Lee Baker and Catherine Borowski) on one of their Flower Cloud benches in City Place.
The City Place mixed-use development in Spring has become one of the most active outdoor art installation galleries in Houston, and definitely the most dynamic one north of the loop. Thanks to an agreement signed with Weingarten Art Group last year, they've installed several pop-up art projects, such as the virtual waterfall designed by Montreal-based art studio Iregular.
Now, they've added another international construction, this time via London-based Graphic Rewilding. Flower Clouds is a series of benches that are made to highlight local floral species. Lee Baker (the artist) and Catherine Borowski (the curator and producer), made a special trip to Houston to study native flowers before beginning the commision.
“That is one of the gratifying things about work: People often tell us they’re seeing nature through new eyes,” Borowski said. “This is art that is rooted in a place, but for some, this can be an entirely new way of looking at the immediate world around them.”
Graphic Rewilding has done most of their work in their native United Kingdom. All of their pieces have ties to nature, something inspired by Borowski's obsession with a deserted parking garage near her London estate home. She imagined the lifeless concrete covered in a lush garden.
Baker, who hand draws all the art, incorporates massive flowers into cityscapes. Usually, the flowers dwarf people in comparative size, reducing viewers to the size of ants and de-emphasizing the scale of the building around the installations. It's a stunning way to re-contextualize nature as something strong and equal to industrial progress, a sentiment captured perfectly in Flower Clouds.
“We both believe in the power of public art. In this case, to bring nature and its emotional connections to unexpected urban spaces,” Baker said. “Even a depiction of flowers has the ability to emotionally reconnect the viewer with and have empathy for the sensory powers of the natural world.”
Flower Clouds consists of seven benches located at 1250 Lake Plaza Drive (Spring). The sizes vary due to the nature of the flowers, but each is around six feet tall and ten feet wide. Twenty-five Texas species of flowers, vegetables, birds, and insects are depicted, making the pieces educational as well as striking.
Graphic Rewilding previously staged a version of Flower Clouds at Kensington and Chelsea Art Week in London in 2023. This is the fourth pop-up installation created by the partnership between City Place and Weingarten Art Group. Flower Cloud will be on display through July 27, with a month-long hiatus in May.
