Can contemporary art heighten our awareness of the natural world, bringing the beauty and jeopardy of what surrounds us into sharper focus? The curators of the recently completed Wild Eye coastal art and nature trail in North Yorkshire, England, believe so. Co-produced by art-science-climate organization Invisible Dust and local charity Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, Wild Eye has brought together international artists and conservation experts through a series of commissioned works in and around the seaside town of Scarborough. Developed over a five-year period and featuring sculpture, mosaic, and phone-based augmented reality, the trail’s production timeline was bookended by works from two of the U.K.’s most high-profile and prolific contemporary artists, Ryan Gander and Jeremy Deller.
Deller’s Roman Mosaic c. 2025, the final addition to the trail, opened to the public earlier this year. It is sited in a recently renovated, mock-Victorian public sea-watching station, which provides views across Scarborough Bay and out to the North Sea. As the title suggests, this is an all-new mosaic with an air of Roman antiquity about it. Riffing on Scarborough’s ancient history—there is evidence of a fourth-century Roman signal station on the grounds of Scarborough Castle, which is situated on a rocky promontory looming above Deller’s work—the mosaic is presented in fragments, as if unearthed during an archaeological dig.
In collaboration with Sheffield-based sculptor and mosaic artist Coralie Turpin, the design process for the 50,000-piece work involved initial sketching and a blending of illustration styles in order to create a slightly off-kilter sense of ancient and modern. Deller says he wanted it to be public art “that didn’t get in the way,” particularly of the views out to sea, adding that the mosaic “hints at the possibility of the past being still present, just beneath our feet, and perhaps inclines us to think about what traces we will leave behind on the world.” The fragmentary nature of the mosaic “was important—you can’t tell a complete story,” while the imagery ties in with the site’s use as a place to view the abundant sea life in the area. (Deller’s visits to Scarborough during the development of the commission included a nature-spotting boat trip across the bay.)
Deller conceived the mosaic as a playful attempt to momentarily bamboozle viewers into thinking it might truly be the remains of a Roman artwork, though his concept has been upended by a large curatorial information board: “I didn’t realize there’d be a huge thing about it on the wall, it gives the game away.” Which is to say, it gives the game away too quickly, rather than allowing a few moments of catch-up as visitors take in form and imagery, flitting from Roman wind god to fish-chasing seal to leaping porpoises and a frolicking blue whale. There’s a Roman sailing boat, too, its ensign a conspicuously un-Roman smiley face—a very Deller touch.
A short walk downhill, Paul Morrison’s Sea Oak (2024) also references the sea, although in this case the life form is vegetable rather than animal. The large-scale, highly polished seaweed-shaped sculpture made from marine-grade stainless steel stands gleaming in the sun on a functional gray plinth at the end of a short section of the harbor wall, a site that on stormier days is often drenched by waves. The choice of this particular spot, especially its proximity to the sea and fishing boats in the harbor, chimes with Wild Eye’s interest in our changing relationship with the natural world. “There’s a seaweed farm a couple of miles offshore from here,” explains Wild Eye curator Jeanine Griffin, “and we wanted it to connect to the sea and to this regenerative aquaculture that is developing.”
Morrison’s monument to bladderwrack seaweed (scientific name, Fucus vesiculosus) is beautifully simple, its slender form and shiny surface creating an illusion of movement, like the seaweed itself as it sways underwater. “Sometimes it almost disappears, because it reflects the blue of the sky and the sea,” says Griffin. “You see something different every time you come because the conditions are different—it’s become a really popular fixture.” Griffin notes that in order to maintain the reflective nature of this permanent work, the local council has been given a maintenance fund for its upkeep. That not all public art receives this kind of aftercare is brought home by an unconnected commission from 2013 also installed on the harbor wall. Hemmed in by picnic benches and an ice cream sign, this metal sculpture depicts a large tuna being hauled from the sea. Like Scarborough’s long-gone tuna fishing industry, it has seen better days.
Not all the works on the Wild Eye trail require protection from the weather. Ambiguous Machines (2024), Shezad Dawood’s collaboration with writer Daisy Hildyard, is viewed on phones and accessed by QR codes at three different spots along the seafront. Drawing on climate research, it uses augmented reality to imagine a future in which Scarborough is under water and humans have evolved to become hybrid sea creatures. These characters reference real-life scientists whose research helped inform the work, while Hildyard’s text provides a fictional narrative for the submerged world. The messaging around climate change and rising sea levels is hard to miss, but Dawood and Hildyard approach it with a light touch that feels appropriate for the seaside setting.
Away from the seafront, Emma Smith’s Old Friends (2025) is similarly interactive, although there is nothing digital about it. Situated along a disused railway line that is now a busy nature walk, her sculptures are carved out of Swaledale Fossil, a crinoidal limestone teeming with fossilized marine invertebrates. The forms, which double as seats, are variously described as “nesting” and “resting” spaces, as well as a “bio-adaptive stone sitting circle,” set within trees and designed for children as a play-and-make area. Smith also installed listening and whispering holes in the walls of a viaduct at one end of the walk, which are signaled by small stone plaques with the words “HEAR” and “TELL” carved on them. Passersby are invited to listen to the sounds of nature and then whisper their secrets to the bees—an ancient tradition that has its origins in Celtic mythology and the notion that bees provide a link to the “spirit world.”
The works that make up the Wild Eye project, including three sculptural benches by Juneau Projects at nearby Whitby (There Is Another Alphabet, 2022), are all permanent—except for one. Ryan Gander’s We are only human (Incomplete sculpture for Scarborough to be finished by snow) (2022) will remain on the grounds of Scarborough Castle, an English Heritage property, until 2033. Made from eco concrete, the sculpture is based on the complex geometrical form of a dolos; grouped together in massive numbers, these giant concrete structures are used as a sea defense, and they can be seen in action along Scarborough’s seafront. Siting the work high above the waves on a headland makes an unambiguous statement about the challenges we face from rising sea levels.
Speaking to The Guardian at the time of the sculpture’s installation in 2022, Gander said he love the shapes, describing them as “brutalist-looking geometric forms…Dolos don’t seem of this world, there’s something extra-terrestrial about them.” We are only human does look like an alien space pod or something out of a sci-fi movie, yet it, too, serves as a well-used seat, made more comfortable thanks to a subtle intervention by the artist. Gander has tweaked the shape of his dolos so that it can only resume its original form when covered in snow, which—in theory—will fill the gentle curves and dips in the structure. It is, however, unlikely that there will ever be enough snowfall in this location to complete the sculpture, particularly with winters getting warmer due to climate change.
Gander’s sculpture is the most visually impactful and conceptually interesting work on the Wild Eye trail. It cleverly embodies the push and pull of this art and nature project, and in particular the contradictions and conflicts wrapped up in our relationship with the natural world, as we seek to find solutions to human-made climate problems. Will putting art objects like this into public spaces help the natural world? Probably not. The conversations and thinking provoked by this kind of project, however, just might.
