Forest Cathedral

A forest of mirrored mobiles inside a 13th-century tithe barn — Messums West, Wiltshire, 2026.

Forest Cathedral transforms the tithe barn at Messums West, with its tree-like beams, into a living forest of light and sound. A kinetic sculpture of branching limbs and mirrored leaves gently moves with air currents created by visitors, filtering light through this forest canopy. Layered shadows animate the floor below while reflected light illuminates the ancient timbers above.

A dimensional soundscape rises from grounding tones of the forest floor and root systems through rustling mid-range frequencies to the bright presence of canopy birdsong. Forest Cathedral unites light and sound as wavelengths that move throughout the space.

The Forest Cathedral installation is designed to tour England's most significant Gothic cathedrals; the start of this journey will be at Winchester Cathedral in February 2027.

Photo: Johnny Messum

Wide view of the barn's timber roof canopy hung with mirrored mobiles

"Transcendent."

– Messums Visitor

A visitor looking up at the mobiles, shadows cast across the stone wall

Close-up of a mirrored mobile against the timber roof

Close-up shadow and leaf texture on a stone wall

Light beams through the roof windows with a visitor below

Visitors reclining in warm light during a reflection session

"Extraordinarily Peaceful & Introspective."

– Messums Visitor

A visitor standing in green light beneath the mobiles

Visitors reclining in the space during a reflection session

A visitor standing inside a single beam of light

"If churches were like this, I would go more often."

– Messums Visitor

$Coloured light fracturing across a stone pillar$

for a behind-the-scenes look

Photo: Ágoston Horonyi Visitors walking together past the black steel pavilion of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Walking With

Walking With Our Future Ideas — Festival of Future Nows, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2025.

Where do we go from here? Artist Andrew Amondson invited visitors to walk with him and with the ideas that will shape our shared futures with the living world. These generative walks investigate 'openings', or moments when walking together creates the necessary space, time, and attention for creative connection and collective agency. Each walk took twenty-two minutes, followed by a period of shared reflection.

As part of that reflection, each visitor was invited to draw a line on an aerial map of Neue Nationalgalerie, remembering their route around the museum and marking the spots where they felt a connection or resonance, finishing with three short reflections on the back of a postcard. A selection of those postcards, transcribed and translated between English and German, can be seen here.

Walking With Our Future Ideas is a performance of Walking With, a walking-based research and creative practice by Andrew Amondson.

Film: Yanina Isla

Photo: Ágoston Horonyi Two people walking together in conversation on a Berlin street

Walking With

Studio Olafur Eliasson, Berlin, 2024–2025.

In spring 2024, Andrew Amondson invited Studio Olafur Eliasson to go for a walk. Motivated by a 2014 Stanford study that found a person's creative output increases by an average of 60% when they are walking, Andrew proposed exploring the effects of integrating walking into the work day as a way to provide space, time, and attention for creative ideation and connection. Andrew's project, titled Walking With, set out to explore the cognitive and embodied potentials of walking as a creative practice.

Framed by EER (Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting), Walking With grew at the studio within the Garden, an experimental space at the heart of the studio's working culture, where there are no intended outcomes and where the freedom to explore, speculate, and experiment without the pressure of measurable results is actively cultivated.

Data visualization of GPS route segments converging from multiple Walking With sessions

Walking With Studio Olafur Eliasson Interactive Map and Research Repository

Three chandeliers hang above tall grasses filling the Grand Ballroom of the Bath Assembly Rooms

Wondering Ways

National Trust Bath Assembly Rooms, 2023.

Wondering Ways is a living art installation, transforming the Grand Ballroom in the Bath Assembly Rooms by filling it with tall grasses to wonder through, to find both shared and private spaces for reflection.

A Wood Henge made from a 250 year old fallen beech tree, the same age as the Assembly Rooms, was re-imagined to honor its history and a hopeful future.

Wondering Ways was co-created with Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios for Forest of Imagination 2023 - Assemble in the Forest, and features music by Cosmo Sheldrake.

Photo: @wanderlut_on_wheelz

Through the open doors of the Ballroom, tall dry grass fills the room beneath a chandelier

Standing wooden slabs of the Wood Henge rise behind a field of grass beneath two chandeliers

Wood Henge slabs in a shaft of light, with visitors seated on a curved bench between them

School children crouch to enter a low timber-framed den among the grasses

Photo: Shanti Faiia

Tree roots seen from below through an oval opening, with the ballroom columns beyond

Photo: National Trust Images / Barry Batchelor

A child reaches up to touch a grass seed head, standing in a ring of soil

Photo: National Trust Images / Barry Batchelor

Four young people talk in a circle among tall grasses

Photo: Nicola Turner

Two visitors stand in tall grass beneath chandeliers, a young tree behind them

Sunlit grass seed heads in the foreground, with chandeliers and windows beyond

for a behind-the-scenes look

Photo: Ales Bonaccorsi A corridor of tree-shaped wooden arches hung with mirrored leaf mobiles, woven nests on a green carpet and a yellow doorway

Where We Find Ourselves

Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo da Vinci, Milan, 2024.

Where We Find Ourselves is a permanent art installation in the Playlab of the museum. It is an invitation to explore the forest, to touch sound, and to find yourself within the forest's chorus. It was created at the museum's invitation and focuses on our connection to nature and one another.

A bird sings when it feels safe, and research shows that a bird's song both calms us and helps us self-regulate. When a child feels safe, it creates the space where imagination can grow.

The sounds come from citizen science recordings of birds and other species geolocated in and around Milan, with a score composed by Ananda Costa. The nests and eggs are courtesy of the Andrea Salvetti family.

Photo: Ales Bonaccorsi

Mirrored leaf mobiles hang over tree-shaped arches and a woven nest in a green room

Photo: Ales Bonaccorsi

A large woven nest holding soft stones in the foreground, with tree-shaped arches and a smaller nest of mirrored eggs beyond

Photo: Ales Bonaccorsi

Three mirrored eggs in a woven nest in the foreground, with a second nest and an orange doorway beyond

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Photo: Lloyd Evans The Living Tree at The Egg, Theatre Royal Bath: a tall tepee of bare poles ringed with ferns, with glowing green and blue orbs hanging in the dark space around it

The Living Tree

The Egg, Theatre Royal Bath; Entry Hill, Bath; and Bishopstrow Hotel, 2021–2026.
Winner of the Inspire Future Generations Prize, 2022

The Living Tree Mirror Maze invited visitors and participants to walk through a geometric maze of mirrors into a living forest of sound, light and sensory experiences. The sound installation by musician Cosmo Sheldrake was composed using nine years of recorded amber-listed British birdsong, creating a beautiful and haunting soundscape for the Living Tree Forest. Designer Matthew Leece created a FUNgal network of connecting and communicating tubes to represent the concept of a mycelium network in the Egg Theatre café below the forest floor, inviting visitors into a deeper understanding of how the forest and humans are all connected, and to learn like a forest (Bateson 2023).

A child and an adult crouching beside them, seen from behind, look toward the Living Tree: a tepee of bare poles in a dark hall, ringed with ferns, with pale spheres hanging around it and bright light behind.

Photo: Charlotte Piddington

"It's so interesting to think about how we used to frame forests as scary, dangerous places – and are now telling such a different story of care taking. I can't think of anything I've seen that expresses that better – or with more delight."

Margaret Heffernan, author of Embracing Uncertainty

Photo: Abigail Tinnion Two girls, seen from behind, look up into the Living Tree, a tepee of bare poles lit in deep blue, with bright light at the left.

Photo: Abigail Tinnion

Close view of the Living Tree's bare poles in deep blue and violet light, with a few dry branches at the left.

Photo: Abigail Tinnion

The base of the Living Tree: bare poles rising from mounds of moss and ferns in low warm light.

Photo: Abigail Tinnion

Two girls crouch in the dark beside a patch of moss inside the Living Tree, lit in violet.

Photo: Abigail Tinnion

Looking straight up inside the Living Tree: a beam of light falls through a ring of bare poles.

Photo: Abigail Tinnion

Two children stand among poles and moss inside the Living Tree, holding a softly glowing white sphere between them.

Photo: Abigail Tinnion

Looking through the bare poles of the Living Tree at curtains of small warm lights hanging in the dark.

Photo: Abigail Tinnion

An adult and a small child lean in to touch a mossy stump with a young fern growing from it, lit in a pool of light in the dark hall.

Photo: Abigail Tinnion

Two young children with small backpacks stand in a doorway framed by moss and ferns.

Photo: Abigail Tinnion

Looking up through the poles of the Living Tree, with warm points of light glowing between them.

A giant pale rabbit sits on a grassy hillside, seen through sheer blue fabric stretched across the foreground.

Forest of Imagination

Bath, UK. Selected installations and invitations, made as Lead Artist since 2021.

Forest of Imagination is an annual, free arts and architecture event in Bath. Each year it takes a familiar space in the city and reimagines it as a forest, to spark creativity and bring people closer to nature. It is run by House of Imagination with Grant Associates, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios and Bath Spa University, together with Bath's creative, cultural and educational community.

Over the years it has taken over Queen Square, the spaces around Bath Abbey, the Assembly Rooms and the Holburne Museum and Gardens. Most recently it has taken root at Entry Hill, a forgotten green space the organisers hope will become a permanent Arts and Nature Park.

As Lead Artist since 2021, Andrew Amondson has made the installations and invitations that follow, inviting connection and wonder.

Sheer pale blue fabric billows in the sunlight above a meadow, held up on canes, with dark trees and blue sky behind.

The Water's Way

Entry Hill and the American Museum & Gardens, Bath, 2026.

Hundreds of meters of shimmering blue and white fabric billow and lift on the wind, daylighting the ancient Lyn Brook buried beneath Entry Hill. In urban planning, daylighting is the practice of bringing rivers back to the surface of towns and cities, unburying them from the dark tunnels in which they have been confined, and letting the water meet the sun again. Here, the brook returns not in water but in light and air and moving translucent fabric: a river conjured from memory, flowing once more across the hillside.

The work invites soft fascination; attention held without effort, the kind that doesn't deplete but restores. Let your gaze follow the ribbon of fabric as it lifts and falls. Let it drift. The mind, given permission to wander, begins quietly to recover.

Photo: Emma Seal

A child runs through long grass beneath a billowing sheet of pale blue fabric held up on canes, the fabric stretching away across the meadow.

A long sheer ribbon of fabric sweeps across the frame against a purple dusk sky, with dark trees behind it.

The Big Pink Caterpillar

Entry Hill, Bath, 2025.

The Big Pink Caterpillar is a 50-meter-long tunnel sculpture crafted from coppiced willow and repurposed pink ripstop fabric, crawling playfully up the green landscape toward the future site of the Butterfly House designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios. This whimsical land art installation embodies the long-term vision for the Entry Hill site as a destination where art, nature, and transformation converge.

At its heart, The Big Pink Caterpillar is a color experiment that fundamentally shifts visitors’ perception of place. As people journey through the pink-tinted tunnel, their visual adaptation recalibrates. Upon emergence, the greens appear impossibly greener, the natural world more vivid and alive. This phenomenological shift demonstrates how our perception of nature is not fixed but malleable, shaped by experience, context, and wonder.

Photo: Penny Hay

Children walk in a line beneath the long pink tunnel, their legs and feet visible under the fabric.

Photo: Emma Seal

A man in a green jacket and jeans stands in long grass with a checked scarf over his face, the pink tunnel behind him.

Looking out through trees across a valley toward the houses and hills of Bath, with the pink caterpillar tunnel curving across a small meadow below.

watch the film

Teal hammocks hung between the trunks of tall trees in a woodland grove.

Collective Daydreaming

Entry Hill, Bath, 2026.

Twelve blue hammocks flow through a grove of trees on Entry Hill, connecting to the River of Dreams, the theme of Forest of Imagination in fall 2026. Collective Daydreaming asks visitors to do one thing: nothing. The hammocks cradle. Sound and light filter down through the leaves.

If something comes from the nothing, there are paper and markers to record it.

The work draws on Andrew Amondson's research into soft fascination, a key part of Attention Restoration Theory. Soft fascination holds our attention gently and lets the mind wander, restoring our depleted directed attention. Nature does this on its own. This drop-in intervention asks how we can design for it, and does something radical in return: it invites us to stop.

Like the other works in this frame, Collective Daydreaming is about creating the conditions for creative thinking, for the imagination to take root.

A blue hammock hangs between trees in a grove, with a pale golden dog sitting on the path beside it.

A child lying back in a blue hammock holds up a clipboard with a blue crayon drawing of leaves against the trees.

An older woman in sunglasses lies in a blue and teal hammock slung between ivy-covered trees, with a meadow beyond.

A woman in sunglasses holds up a clipboard with her crayon drawing of a person lying in a hammock among red tree trunks.

to watch the film

Walking With · Festival of Future Nows

Postcards from Our Future Ideas

During the Festival of Future Nows at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Walking With Our Future Ideas invited visitors to walk the museum's grounds alongside strangers and talk about the future. After the walk, each person filled in a postcard: a line drawn by hand across an aerial view of the site, and three short answers reflecting on their walk.

Eighteen of those postcards are collected below, front and back, in whichever language the person reached for. Click a card to turn it over and read what they wrote, then switch between the original and its translation.

LocationNeue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

FormatHand-drawn route + 3-question reflection

LanguagesGerman & English, as written

Postcards shown18

A visitor holding up their filled-out postcard from Walking With Our Future Ideas

Walking With Our Future Ideas · Participant with postcard

Participants walked alongside strangers, being paired with new walking partners along the way.

They walked and talked. Afterwards, on the front of the postcards they were given, they traced the remembered route and marked the moments on their map where they felt a resonance or connection.

On the back, they finished three sentences about the walk. Click any card in the grid to turn it over.

The postcards

Click to flip · toggle Original / Translation on the back