Jon Foreman Uses Nature Like This (10 Photos)

Jon Foreman does not just place stones and leaves. He flips the switch on a landscape. Beaches turn geometric. Tree hollows turn theatrical. Suddenly nature looks like it planned the pattern first.

These 10 new works are temporary, yes. But casual? Not even close. Tide lines, roots, wet sand, leaf fall, mud, and pebble gradients all get pulled into visual systems so exact they feel ancient and brand new at the same time.

Meet Jon Foreman: the land artist making impermanence feel engineered

Jon Foreman, working as Sculpt the World, is a Pembrokeshire-based land artist building site-specific works from stones, sand, leaves, driftwood, mud, and whatever the location is willing to give up. He grew up around the Pembrokeshire coastline and woodlands, and you can feel that instantly. These places are not backdrops. They are collaborators.

His official bio notes that some pieces stretch up to 100 metres across and that tide, wind, weather, and even interruption are all part of the process. CBS once framed the beach as his canvas, which is fair, but only half fair. He is just as sharp in the woods, where leaves become gradients, hollows become portals, and roots seem to keep growing long after the tree should have stopped.

Foreman has said he began making land art in college and sees the practice as both escape and therapy. That mix matters. It is why the work feels calm and intense at the same time. Nothing looks accidental. Even when rain hits or the tide starts prowling in, the piece still feels locked in.

Temporary does not mean casual. In Jon Foreman’s hands, it means fully alive.

🔗 Follow Jon Foreman / Sculpt the World on Instagram and explore his official site

More on Street Art Utopia: Dive into The Art of Stones (12 Photos by Jon Foreman) and 10 Forest Sculptures By Jon Foreman.

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🪨 Merge at Druidstone

Start with a square. Then watch it inhale. Merge, created at Druidstone, takes the strictest shape around and makes it feel alive. Black stone pours inward. The cliff, waterfall, and wet sand crank up the drama. This does not just sit on the beach. It activates the whole place.

Jon Foreman: I started by drawing a square in the sand, then placed the largest stones in either corner, then slowly worked my way down. Its one of those works that gets slower the further you get into the piece, covering less space with each placement. I’ve worked on a similar piece in the past but wanted to scale it up, its also nice to recreate works in one uniform colour to see the differences. Druidstone really offers up the atmosphere doesn’t it? Imagine it big enough to walk through. Someone help me make that happen as a piece of public art.

💡 Nerd Fact: Druidston’s cliffs are geologically messy in the best possible way. Pembrokeshire Coast National Park notes that whole cliff faces here can be made of Quaternary deposits such as till, solifluction deposits, frost-shattered scree and wind-blown sand, while the beach is also known for natural arches and caves. So that hard-edged square is sitting inside a landscape shaped by Ice Age debris and ongoing erosion, not by neat geometry.

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🌪️ Carved Void at Lindsway Bay

Carved Void, made at Lindsway Bay, hits like three images at once: rose, whirlpool, shell section. The carved sand softens it. The pebble lines sharpen it. Together they make the beach look like it briefly revealed its own hidden blueprint.

Jon Foreman: Really enjoy the carving process, its just so time consuming to try and do both sand and stones. I’d love to scale this style up much more. This style of flowing lines is something that’s been developing through my style over the last few years, I don’t think its going anywhere just yet! Its particularly obvious in my sand drawing work and one of many features I like to come back to. I love recurring themes.

💡 Nerd Fact: Lindsway Bay is not just a pretty setting; it is a named geology reference site. The bay is the type section for the Lindsway Bay Formation and also exposes the transition from marine Silurian beds into terrestrial Old Red Sandstone, so this spiral is literally sitting on a shoreline scientists use to read a sea-to-land shift in deep time.

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🌕 Clustermoon at Freshwater West

Two days. One open center. Maximum impact. Clustermoon at Freshwater West starts in cool blues and whites, then pushes outward into warmer tones until the ring feels like moonlight, weather, and orbit happening all at once.

Jon Foreman: Two days working on this one, the tides didn’t go all the way up that day/night, it began as the dark blue to white working inwards on the first day and went outward from purple to yellow on the second day.

💡 Nerd Fact: Freshwater West sometimes reveals a submerged fossil forest when the sand moves, so this “moon” of stones is staged on a beach where prehistoric tree remains can periodically reappear underfoot.

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🌱 Grown Stone

Grown Stone is Foreman in a nutshell. The frame is square. The movement refuses to behave. Stones cluster, swell, and stream outward like the whole piece is trying to grow beyond its own border.

Jon Foreman: Organic flow within a square. No its not AI, yes the stones are from that beach, I nearly always shoot towards the sea, the stones are behind the camera.

💡 Nerd Fact: Freshwater West is backed by dunes, wetlands and reedbeds that attract ground-nesting birds, and the coast there forms part of protected habitat. That is one reason Foreman’s removable, low-trace approach feels so well matched to the site.

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🧵 Stone Ribbon at

At first it looks almost too simple. A band of smooth stones stretched between boulders and running toward the sea. Then your eye locks on. Game over. The whole beach starts reorganizing itself around that one line.

Jon Foreman: A lot of back and for gathering and placing and aligning, all the way out to sea. It was kind of a perspective piece, hopefully I’ll get some video made to show it a bit more.

💡 Nerd Fact: A single line across a landscape has serious land-art pedigree. Richard Long’s 1967 A Line Made by Walking turned a temporary track through grass into one of the key works of British land art, so Stone Ribbon reads like a coastal descendant of that idea—less monument, more trace.

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🌗 Moons Motion at Freshwater West

Moons Motion proves a circle does not need to close to feel complete. The arc at Freshwater West moves through earthy and cooler tones so smoothly that the empty middle starts doing its own work. Glow. Breath. Orbit. Negative space. All active.

Jon Foreman: I recall just about finishing placing the last stones and it started raining. This seems to happen to me fairly regularly and is the worst time for it to rain as getting photos in the rain is extremely difficult. Constantly stopping and wiping the lense, trying not to let the camera get too wet. Luckily the rain died off and i was lucky the stones (mostly) dried off pretty quickly before it rained again although you can see some wet patches on the stones.

💡 Nerd Fact: Freshwater West is officially described as a high-wave-stress coast with strong currents and a tidal range of about 6.5 metres, which means even the calmest-looking arc there is being built on a surface the sea is constantly reworking.

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🌀 Incline Spiral

Incline Spiral is dense, grounded, and a little hypnotic. The red stone bands coil outward from a tight center, but instead of loosening up, they build pressure. This is not a beach spiral trying to be pretty. This is a beach spiral with weight.

Jon Foreman: This piece developed from Erythrean Square which I basically continued the curves to complete this. Think it took 2 days, If i remember rightly.

💡 Nerd Fact: Sandy Haven is so geologically important that it gives its name to the Sandy Haven Formation. The rocks there include the 4-metre Townsend Tuff, an ancient volcanic ash layer used as a marker horizon across south-west Wales, plus red mudstones shaped in arid conditions and reworked by seasonal flooding.

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🍃 Leaveshroom Void at

Leaveshroom Void works because it never fights the tree hollow. It lets the hollow stay boss. Instead of covering it, Foreman builds a halo of leaves and sticks around it, and suddenly the trunk looks like it is glowing from the inside.

Jon Foreman: This was a nightmare to make, placing the sticks between the leaves, sticks snapping, wind etc its just very deicate work all round. I tried to have as few sticks going up through the middles as possible so as not to completely block the tree, so I was trying to find stick that bent round (right side) this way the leaves could be kept at the right angle too. I was glad to be done with this one! I like the result and you have to test yourself sometimes. Always love it when the light subtley shines through the leaves too (top left).

💡 Nerd Fact: That hollow is not empty real estate in woodland ecology. Woodland Trust notes that hollow trunks offer more stable temperatures than the outside air and can shelter bats, birds, hedgehogs, fungi, epiphytes and invertebrates, so Foreman is framing one of the busiest little habitats in the forest.

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🍁 Ascending Red at Colby Woods

Created with Layla Parkin at Colby Woods, Ascending Red turns a trunk into a vertical blast of color. The red leaves do not read as falling. They read as climbing. The whole thing feels like sap, flame, and motion getting caught mid-rush.

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🌳 Twisting Tree at Waddesdon Manor

Made for the Art in Nature event, it responds to the trunk’s natural twist by extending that same motion into the ground with added root forms so convincing the line between found and made nearly disappears.

Jon Foreman: Created with Layla️ Parkin for the Art in Nature event at Waddesdon Manor. A response to the natural twist in the tree itself. This took us three days! If you zoom in you can see some of the yellow leaves started going orange before we’d finished the piece. The roots were extended using mud, people visiting the work were regularly thinking that they were actual roots! It wasn’t autumn (created in May) so it was very time consuming gathering the leaves (mostly Laurel) from the nearby area. Definitely one of the most ambitious works I/we have done! Also the leaves were all stuck down with clay, so wind wasn’t an issue🍂🍃🍁

💡 Nerd Fact: The fake roots feel convincing because real tree roots usually spread sideways more than they dive down. Forest Research says 80–90% of a tree’s widespread rooting structure is typically in the top 0.6 metres of soil, and Defra notes roots may spread to up to twice the width of the canopy.

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This is a nice introduction to Jon Foreman:

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Which one is your favorite?