Nature Is Everything (14 Photos)

Nature appears here as material, habitat, and warning.

These 14 works move from playful interventions to direct environmental warnings. Timber, fungi, water, flowers, ice, wildlife, and living cactus pads become part of the art, or the reason it exists.

More: When Street Art Meets Nature (40 Photos)

---

🐗 “Gamla suggan mellan träden” (Old Sow Between the Trees) — By Hannelie Coetzee at Wanås Konst, Knislinge, Sweden 🇸🇪

Completed in 2015, Hannelie Coetzee’s Gamla suggan mellan träden is a large wild boar portrait made from wood, metal, oil, and tar at Wanås Konst. Cut log ends act like pixels, forming the snout, eyes, and markings while the surrounding trees fold the sculpture into the forest.

💡 Nerd Fact: At Wanås, “permanent” is deliberately flexible: nature is allowed to change the experience and durability of the collection, and some works are expected to decay until they disappear. The forest is therefore not merely a backdrop; it becomes a long-term collaborator.

More: Stubb Boar (5 Photos)

🔗 Follow Hannelie Coetzee on Facebook

---

🦋 “Butterfly Effect” — By CYFI in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA 🇺🇸

Painted in 2023 for The Wycliff, CYFI’s 20-by-20-foot aerosol mural uses deep shadows to lift three butterflies away from the brick. An orange monarch, a blue butterfly, and a lime-green butterfly seem to hover above 2327 Wycliff Street in St. Paul.

💡 Nerd Fact: Monarch migration is a relay race with a remarkable final leg: several short-lived generations move north, but members of the fall “super generation” can live for months and fly roughly 2,000–3,000 miles to ancestral wintering grounds in Mexico they have never seen.

More: “Butterfly Effect” by CYFI in St. Paul, Minnesota

🔗 Follow CYFI on Instagram

---

🍄 Mushroom Ballerinas — By Fruktyvrukty in Yekaterinburg, Russia 🇷🇺

This intervention belongs to Fruktyvrukty’s Mushroom series, made for Yekaterinburg’s Carte Blanche festival in 2018. Two paper ballerinas are attached above real shelf fungi growing from a tree, turning the mushrooms into skirts. Small, simple, and easy to miss.

💡 Nerd Fact: A visible mushroom is only a fungus’s spore-bearing fruiting body, not the whole organism. Many shelf fungi are polypores that release spores through tiny pores underneath rather than gills, while wood-decay fungi play a major role in recycling forest nutrients.

More: 11 Photos of Mushroom Ballerinas by Street Artist Fruktyvrukty

🔗 Follow Fruktyvrukty on Instagram

---

🌿 “La Contemplación” — By OXYD (Jhonathan Principe Mamani) near Iquitos, Peru 🇵🇪

OXYD completed La Contemplación at the Rainforest Awareness Rescue and Education Center (RAREC), a licensed wildlife rescue near Iquitos. A human profile merges with Amazonian wildlife and plants. The mural stands at RAREC on the Iquitos–Nauta road, at kilometer 47.

💡 Nerd Fact: RAREC’s work continues after an animal leaves the center. Following the 2023 release of two rehabilitated Amazonian manatees, the team began a two-year project to monitor their movements and habitat preferences—turning rescue into field research.

More: “La Contemplación” — Mural by Jhonathan Principe Mamani in Iquitos, Peru

🔗 Follow OXYD on Instagram

---

🐙 “The Kraken” — By Tyler Toews in Vancouver, Canada 🇨🇦

Created for the 2018 Vancouver Mural Festival, The Kraken was painted at Watson Street and East 15th Avenue. A giant octopus grips a plastic bottle, with a ship trapped inside beneath the waves. The image turns ocean pollution into a trap of humanity’s own making.

💡 Nerd Fact: A real octopus is almost as strange as a kraken: it has three hearts and copper-based hemocyanin, which makes its blood blue. Two hearts serve the gills; the third pumps oxygenated blood around the body.

More: 4 Photos of Octopus Mural by Tyler Toews in Vancouver, Canada

🔗 Follow Tyler Toews on Instagram

---

💧 “Ofrenda por el agua” — By Jotapé (JP) in Roturas, Spain 🇪🇸

Jotapé makes a stream of painted water appear to pour from a real window into a woman’s hands. On the official Muro Crítico page, the artist describes the 2023 mural as an offering and connects it to the privatization of water and other natural resources in his native Chile. It stands at Avenida de la Libertad 24 in Roturas.

💡 Nerd Fact: Chile’s 2022 reform did not simply erase the older privatized system. New water rights became time-limited concessions and human consumption gained priority, while problems surrounding older rights—private property granted in perpetuity—remain unresolved.

More: Exploring the Privatization of Water: “Ofrenda por el agua” (4 Photos)

🔗 Follow JP on Instagram

---

🐺 “All City Movement” — By Jussi TwoSeven in Brighton, UK 🇬🇧

This wolf was one of five monochrome murals in Jussi TwoSeven’s All City Movement, created for Brighton Fringe’s Finnish Season in 2018. Each wall showed the same animal at a different point in its stride; together they formed a city-scale animation. The pictured wolf was painted high above 40 Middle Street.

💡 Nerd Fact: The title has a graffiti-world echo. To go “all-city” is to spread a name so widely that it becomes recognized across the whole city or transit system; early writers such as Cornbread helped establish that status by writing their names everywhere.

More: Wolves in Motion (5 Murals)

🔗 Visit Jussi TwoSeven’s website

---

🐝 “The Bird & The Bee” — By Curtis Hylton in Swindon, UK 🇬🇧

Curtis Hylton painted The Bird & The Bee for Swindon Paint Fest 2023. A hummingbird reaches into a flower while a bee hovers among oversized yellow-orange blooms across the gable at 31 Stanley Street, at the corner of Union Street.

💡 Nerd Fact: Bees can read floral signals that humans cannot see. Many bee-pollinated blooms contain ultraviolet “nectar guides” that point toward pollen and nectar, so a real bee would perceive an extra layer of wayfinding absent from ordinary human vision.

More: 3 Photos and Video of “The Bird & The Bee” by Curtis Hylton in Swindon, UK

🔗 Follow Curtis Hylton on Instagram

---

🦝 “Mapache’s Stare” — By Sonny Behan in Cozumel, Mexico 🇲🇽

Created for Sea Walls Cozumel in 2019, Mapache’s Stare centers on the critically endangered Cozumel raccoon. A landfill is reflected in the animal’s eye, one side of its face dissolves into paint, and a cruise ship is hidden among the splatters. The mural addresses habitat loss, plastic pollution, mass tourism, and coastal development, and can be found near Avenida Rafael E. Melgar in San Miguel de Cozumel.

💡 Nerd Fact: “Pygmy” is not just a nickname. The Cozumel raccoon is an example of island dwarfism: adults average about 18% shorter and 45% lighter than nearby mainland raccoons.

More: “Mapache’s Stare” by Sonny in Cozumel, Mexico (8 Photos)

🔗 Follow Sonny Behan on Instagram

---

🎣 “On the Horizon” — By Li-Hill, James Bullough & ONUR in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France 🇫🇷

This mural is one half of On the Horizon, created for Street Art Boulogne-sur-Mer in 2021. Across Rue Laennec, a second wall shows sunlight over a shoal of fish. The road places viewers between two ecological futures, linked by a shared horizon.

💡 Nerd Fact: Boulogne-sur-Mer was not a generic seaside choice: its port is France’s leading fishing port and Europe’s leading center for processing and marketing seafood. A climate warning built around a fisherman therefore carries particular weight in a city whose identity and economy are tied directly to the sea.

More: “On the Horizon” — Street Art on the Climate Crisis (4 Photos)

🔗 Follow Li-Hill, James Bullough, and ONUR on Instagram

---

🧊 “Mirage” — By David Popa in Southern Finland 🇫🇮

David Popa later identified this first charcoal-on-ice experiment as Mirage. The floe cracked halfway through, but he continued and documented the portrait from above. The experiment helped launch the approach he later developed in his Fractured series on ice floes in southern Finland.

💡 Nerd Fact: The charcoal-and-ice contrast has a climate-science echo, although it does not explain why this particular floe cracked. On a much larger scale, dark particles on snow and ice reduce albedo, causing the surface to absorb more solar energy and melt faster—the “snow-darkening” effect studied in black-carbon research.

More: Creating a Portrait on a Small Ice Float in Southern Finland

🔗 Follow David Popa on Instagram

---

🧊 “Minimum Monument” — 1,000 Ice Figures by Néle Azevedo in Berlin, Germany 🇩🇪

On September 2, 2009, WWF Germany presented 1,000 figures from Néle Azevedo’s ongoing Minimum Monument at Gendarmenmarkt. The project began as an anti-monument honoring anonymous people rather than heroes; this Berlin edition was staged with WWF to draw attention to Arctic warming. The figures began melting within 30 minutes.

💡 Nerd Fact: Azevedo’s figures are only about 20 centimeters tall, and passersby help place them on public steps. The audience therefore performs part of the installation, replacing the usual untouchable monument to a hero with a temporary crowd of ordinary bodies.

More: 1,000 Melting Ice Sculptures in Berlin Warn About Climate Change

🔗 Visit Néle Azevedo’s website

---

🔥 “The Wrong Amazon Is Burning” — 2022 Activist Projection in Berlin, Germany 🇩🇪

During the 2022 Make Amazon Pay day of action, activists projected this slogan and others onto the unfinished EDGE East Side tower beside Warschauer Straße. At the time, the building was planned as Amazon’s future Berlin office. The wordplay contrasts the company with the rainforest while linking the protest to labor and climate justice.

💡 Nerd Fact: This tactic has a name: culture jamming. It takes an instantly recognizable commercial image or name and converts it into a question about corporate responsibility and hidden social or environmental costs, using the target’s own familiarity as the delivery system.

More: “The Wrong Amazon Is Burning” on the Amazon Tower in Berlin

---

🌵 Hope Painted on Cactus — By Ahmad Yasin in Aseera Ashmaliya, West Bank 🇵🇸

In 2016, Ahmad Yasin painted acrylic scenes directly onto living prickly pear pads in his home garden in Aseera Ashmaliya near Nablus. Images of mothers and newborns emphasize hope, while the cactus’s spines and resilience remain part of the work. The artist said the wider series was intended to offer hope rather than despair.

💡 Nerd Fact: In Palestinian visual culture, the cactus carries a linguistic as well as botanical meaning: its Arabic name is linked to ṣabr, “patience” or endurance, and the plant has become a symbol of resistance. Yasin was painting onto a living emblem, not a neutral surface.

More: 8 Pics: Palestinian Artist Paints the Suffering of His People on Cactus Plants

---

Which one is your favorite?