Super Bloom Art Exhibit opens Oct. 9 with an explosion of color and more than 21 vibrant floral art installations that will transform Desert Botanical Garden into a magical destination this fall.
The exhibit, Graphic Rewilding’s largest-ever solo presentation, is created and designed by artists Lee Baker and Catherine Borowski.
Their creative partnership began 13 years ago, bringing together curation, artistic vision and material innovation to create immersive works inspired by nature, art and community.
Graphic Rewilding’s work magnifies the smallest details into vibrant, larger-than-life installations that spark wonder and reimagine everyday spaces.
Discover more about the creative duo and this unique exhibit, featuring glass houses radiating with color, whimsical flower clouds and an immersive indoor experience inside The RAF Exhibit Gallery.
Read our exclusive Q&A with Lee and Catherine below.
Q: What has the process been like? What are you most excited to showcase?
This has been the most in-depth project we’ve ever worked on—that covers our learning and appreciation of the site-specific flora and fauna, our personal creative development and technical development working closely with such a wide-ranging team to pull off such an ambitious show. It’s been two and a half years in the making. There were multiple site visits and a lot of time getting to know the cactus, the agave and the pollinators: photographing, sketching, scanning, digitally drawing, composing and 3D rendering. These are desert species we’d only ever seen in books, old cartoons and, ridiculous as it sounds, cowboy films! When you’ve grown up in the city, seeing them in person is properly thrilling.
The thing we’re most excited about is the glass houses. The idea hit us on a site visit, but we sat on it for a while. Our original ideas had started to feel a little over-complex, and when we took the glasshouses to the curatorial team, everyone got it straight away. We’ve been picturing them dotted across the Garden for a very long time, so seeing them actually standing there is a bit surreal. They started as a simple idea but quickly developed into something way more elaborate!
Q: Which desert flowers were you most fascinated by? Why those colours?
The ones that really got us were the ones we didn’t expect. The delicate Queen of the Night blooms once, after dark, and has closed again by sunrise, so hardly anyone sees it. It shows off all its magic for the night pollinators and is gone by the next day. That’s pretty much our whole mission in one plant: drawing attention to the things that would otherwise go unnoticed.
As for colour, the desert had already done most of the work. You’ve got the hot coral and magenta of barrel cactus flowers, the violet of lupine and evening primrose, and the acid yellow of creosote against an intense electric blue sky. Our job was to crank it all up to an exaggerated level. We’ve coined a phrase for this process of simplifying pattern and shape, flattening backgrounds, exploding plant details to a huge scale and exaggerating colours so they’re impossible to ignore: “Microscopic Maximalism”.
Q: Tell us about the glass houses.
They’re the heart of the show. They’re the kind of greenhouse you might have at the bottom of your garden, blown up into monuments, with unusual and unexpected shapes that will take people by surprise. Each one is a different scale and orientation and heralds a different bloom: barrel cactus, prickly pear, cholla and aloe vera, as well as desert wildflowers. We’re endlessly fascinated by the intense coloured light of stained glass, from Gaudí’s Sagrada Família to Louis Comfort Tiffany’s revolutionary Art Nouveau work. By day our glasshouses will glow with sunlight, and after dark they’re lit from within, so you can see them from right across the Garden, like beacons of joy. We liked the idea of taking something humble and making people do a double take.
Q: Were there any challenges?
We’re based in the UK, so every site visit was a proper expedition, and we were juggling time zones throughout. Then, there was local fabrication and supply chains. The Arizona sun was a new one for us, since UV and heat aren’t things we get much practice with at home, so we spent a lot of time testing how the prints would hold up. And then there’s the sheer ambition of it: 22 artworks across the entire Garden that not only represent the collection in a profound way but also sit in harmony with the existing architecture.
Every problem was met quickly and generously by the curatorial and fabrication teams at Desert Botanical Garden. Two artists with big ideas only get you so far. This took a whole team who cared about the work as much as we do.
Q: What do you hope guests take away?
Awe and wonder, but arrived at through something familiar. We’d love visitors to leave with a slightly recalibrated sense of what deserves their attention, because the desert and everything living in it is extraordinary.
Our practice is built around what we call the “cognitive pause”. That’s the moment something beautiful stops you in your tracks and your brain lets go of everything else for a few seconds. We hope everyone finds one of those somewhere on the trails, and takes it home with them.
Q: Can you talk about the collaboration with our Garden Shop?
This is our very first merch range, and we loved making it. Each piece is a small artwork in its own right, something you can actually live with. We wanted it to feel as considered as the artworks themselves, like an extension of the show. What’s great is that we haven’t watered anything down or simply cut out bits of the designs to make products. They’re presented exactly as they are in the Garden.
The Garden Shop then went and built a bespoke pergola to house it, echoing the glasshouses. The care they’ve put into it is spectacular, and we’re really moved by the effort.
Q: Anything else you’d like to share?
This is the largest solo exhibition we’ve ever made, and the most extraordinary setting we’ve worked in. In our career we’ve taken over a museum rooftop in Shanghai big enough to see from the sky, covered a town centre in Crawley, and created vast artworks at the New York Botanical Garden. But the inspiration of the Sonoran Desert is something else: the scale, the light, and the sheer stubborn resilience of the plants that thrive here.
Super Bloom is our love letter to this landscape. We hope visitors can feel that two artists all the way from rainy, very un-desert Britain fell completely in love with it.
