HSBC: Wimbledon Art: Ackroyd & Harvey

As part of HSBC’s partnership with the 2008 Wimbledon Championships, JWT London commissioned leading British artists Ackroyd & Harvey to produce a unique artwork using the medium of grass. As grass is at the heart of the Wimbledon experience, this piece captures the unique essence of the most famous lawn Tennis tournament in the world. The piece that Ackroyd & Harvey have produced is a fascinating combination of art and science, of past and present. By projecting a black and white negative image onto a patch of grass as it grows (in a dark room) they use natural photosensitive properties of the grass to reproduce photographs – thus using grass as a living photographic medium. From a distance they look like any other monochrome photograph; up close they look like perfectly ordinary grass. Typical exposure time is just over a week, with the image projected for 12 hours a day. For this work, they photographed three people at Wimbledon prior to the tournament, and displayed the resulting grass versions of the photos on three large panels in Merton Park, where the tennis fans have been camping and then queuing for tickets this year. Next to the piece you can read about the three people featured who represent the essence of Wimbledon: Tara Moore, competing in the qualifying tournament; Eddie Seaward, head groundsman at Wimbledon for the last 15 years; and Lizzie May, a coach for the Wimbledon Junior Tennis Initiative.