A bold and immersive new installation at the corner of Sussex Gardens and Edgware Road, commissioned by the Church Commissioners for England and created by Heywood & Condie, reimagines what a garden can be, and what it can mean in a world increasingly shaped by technology.
© Rachel Warne
Helter Skelter is not a conventional garden. It straddles the line between landscape, sculpture, and fine art, a hybrid artwork designed to resonate with the historic and mythically charged site of Old Tyburnia. This visionary “techno-landscape” fuses organic and artificial forms, offering a pop-art-infused reflection on our increasingly screen-mediated experience of the natural world.
Drawing inspiration from global garden traditions, from Chinese scholar’s rocks to Zen dry gravel landscapes, and blending them with abstract sculptural forms and psychedelic patterns, Helter Skelter reimagines classic garden elements. Rivers, pools, forests, mountains, and grasslands are transformed into exaggerated, jewel-like, or microscopic lifeforms, merging the smallest and largest scales of nature into a single animated environment.
At the heart of this futuristic Eden stands LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), a sculpted, bejewelled organism symbolising the origins of life itself. The installation embodies the idea that gardens can be a medium for fine art and that the rituals of gardening may reconnect us with nature and animistic thought, the belief that all of life has sentient qualities.
The garden pulses with panpsychic energy, where artificial and organic forms coexist as one sentient living entity. Plants twist and intertwine with sculptural counterparts, creating a hybrid Eden where the boundaries between natural and synthetic dissolve.
© Rachel Warne
Helter Skelter transforms further at night. Neon lighting casts electric hues across the landscape, turning it into a surreal, otherworldly dreamscape. Complementing the visuals is a specially composed ambient soundscape, layering recordings of birds, insects, and amphibians into a digitally manipulated “electric dawn chorus.” The result is a constantly evolving, immersive environment where familiar natural sounds are reimagined for the contemporary age.
© Rachel Warne
© Rachel Warne
Visitors can explore an additional layer of the garden through a QR code embedded in the space. This unlocks poetic, surreal, and mythic interpretations of Helter Skelter, allowing the garden to “speak” as a living spirit through text, imagery, and poems.
Helter Skelter is intentionally left to grow and shift with minimal intervention, inviting visitors to witness the merging of the natural and the synthetic over time. It continues the long tradition of gardens as idealised visions of nature, from Eden to contemporary landscapes, while offering a bold, technological reinterpretation for the 21st century.
In Helter Skelter, Heywood & Condie present a new animated landscape that asks us to reconsider our connection to the non-human world, a playful, psychedelic, and thought-provoking Eden for Sussex Gardens and beyond.
Explore more here: Church of England – Helter Skelter.
Heywood and Condie are represented by Vigo Gallery – Mason’s Yard London.
© Rachel Warne
