Secret Sunflowers | Secret Garden Party 2014

Concept

I’d been an avid festival goer for many years, so the invitation to produce an art installation at SGP was the perfect opportunity to explore a concept I’d been looking to integrate into an installation for a long time: entropy

For those of you that have ever been to a festival, you’ll know that it can descend rapidly from a place of relative serene order, to something more akin to a LOTR battle. Anybody that’s spent more than 3 days in a tent at Glastonbury knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Now here lies a beautiful parallel between this process and entropy. We can loosely define entropy as a measure of the disorder of the universe. The Greek root of the word translates to “a turning towards transformation” — with that transformation being chaos. There are many real world examples of entropy at work. From decaying buildings and forests going into fall; to sandcastles crumbling and footprints in the snow.

And the chaos of a festival was also the perfect setting to create an installation that captured this universal process. The question then became what the best medium was for capturing this in an exciting and interactive way.

A field of crops was the obvious starting point, as it enabled a large "canvas" into which people could interact. Following weeks of analysis of different crop types for their suitability the iconic Sunflower was settled upon for its charm, size and shape.

Stage 1 - Convincing The Owners

The first step was convincing - Freddie - the organiser and owner of SGP let me corner off a section of the festival to grow what was essentially an experiment. Nobody had ever created an installation like this before and the success of it was entirely dependent on the sunflowers flowering in time for the festival. No sunflowers, no Freddie.

To sell the idea, I had to come up with a fool-proof plan to ensure the sunflowers would flower in time for the festival. Unfortunately the flowering season for all sunflowers in the UK is in late September. Almost 4 weeks after the festival. Nothing could be done until we’d employed the services of an expert. So we scoured the internet for the best sunflower expert we could find. Who told us we need to prepare soil examples to test the conditions and PH of the earth which would give us an idea of what additional fertilisers would be needed. Because we needed the sunflowers to flower earlier than normal, they needed to be planted outside of the normal window for sunflowers germination period - when the earth is still too cold for planting and germination. To solve this issue we needed to use sheep felt to warm the earth a month before planting, then plant the sunflowers, followed by laying the felt back over the soil to allow the seeds to germinate for a month after planting. All the while hoping there wasn't any frost.

We came back to Freddie with this plan, he agreed, and the process got underway.

Stage 2 - Growth

The first 2 months went slowly, before the sunflowers started to pop out of the soil. Once out we had our second issue to deal with - muntjac. A new invasive species in the UK, the Muntjac originally from Asia have spread like giant marauding rats gobbling up crops across the English countryside. Fortunately the local farmers were wise to their habits and had a few measures in place to deal with them, in the form of nets and bird scarers - a controlled exploding device that lets out a huge boom every hour or so.

Then as July arrived - a month before the festival and we had our monthly meeting with Freddie. Bad news. The unusually cold and dry spell for spring had meant the flowers hadn’t received as much rain as they should have, and were growing particularly slowly. As such had only grown to waist height. At this rate they weren’t going to be tall enough or had flowered for the festival. We were all beginning to grow concerned. Freddie’s main worry was that the giant field of sunflowers was very visible from the entire site. If it didn’t work how could they corner off the area. Step-in the trusty portaloo! It was decided that we would “hide” the installation behind a bank of portaloos. The only way of getting into the installation was through a secret portaloo, which had the back of it cut out. No sunflowers and we’d just seal off the entrance.

Nonetheless, 3 weeks before the festival start date, with only a few of the plants having flowered, the heavens opened in true British weather style for 2.5 weeks of non-stop thunder, lightning and most importantly - rain. Lots, and lots, and lots of rain. And in almost perfect serendipitous planning, the rain stopped about 3 days before the festival start-day; and cued a 2-week long heatwave. Over the 3 weeks prior to the festival every sunflower almost doubled in height, and 90% of them had started flowering as the festival began. The festival gates opened and unsuspecting party goers started stumbling across the secret portaloo.

To capture the entropic process of the sunflower field going from a sight of perfect order, to a scene from the anarchists cookbook, I set up an extremely ghetto 2014 time lapse camera in the corner of the field. So whilst it looks like it was recorded on a potato, some stills do capture the entropic madness of what then took place.

Stage 3 - Party

Over the course of the festival, as expected, the sunflower field was slowly destroyed. The ball pit we created in the middle disappeared and a piano we’d set up in the corner ended up upside-down. People in the sunflower field reported it as one of the best experiences they’ve ever had at a festival. And the plan of surprising people who unsuspectingly just wanted the toilet, but ended up in a field of sunflowers - definitely worked!

This is all great and it’s nice when a plan comes together. But it’s also fun when the unexpected happens too. So, as well as destroying the sunflowers, it seemed people also like taking them too. In this case, sunflowers ended up all over the festival site, accompanying photos of festival goers in all sorts of places. One even ended up on stage with a band, being used as a drumstick.

So, in the end the plan worked. A field of sunflowers was created and destroyed in a beautiful scene of chaos, just as planned. Despite all the almost “installation ending” issues, thanks to a huge amount of luck and hard work from all my collaborators it was pulled off. For future reference, I strongly advise against making plants grown on-site a central theme of an art installation. Other than that, stay creative and stay focussed.

For those of you that know me I run an architectural practice in London. But I will be doing more art installations and pieces every few months, and uploading the delivery of them to Youtube. Most will focus around ideas I find interesting, but if you’ve got anything you’d like me to explore, please leave them in the comments below.

As well as loving festivals I also find the world of science a thrilling intellectual playground, rich with ideas from which to conceptualise art installations. There’s a rewarding process of researching and understanding a theory well enough that you can turn it into a tangible, playful installation that draws attention to a concept or process. For this installation I was looking to explore the idea of entropy.