The Wild Escape
Art made by thousands, released into the wild.
The Wild Escape was one of the UK’s largest museum‑based participation projects — bringing together over 500 museums, nearly 100,000 children, and a network of artists, educators and activists to co‑create a vibrant, hopeful vision for the future of our natural world.
Led by Art Fund in collaboration with the BBC, WWF, Arts Council England and the RSPB, the project aligned with David Attenborough’s Wild Isles series and culminated in a nationwide launch on Earth Day.
Children across the UK created artworks inspired by creatures in museum collections — each piece released into a joyful, ever‑evolving digital landscape built with Preloaded. The result was a first‑of‑its‑kind digital artwork, alive with imagination, ecology and creativity, and winner of a European Digital Lovie Award
Creative direction and identity
As Head of Creative, I led the creative vision for the campaign ; developing the brief and guiding our agency partners in building an identity flexible enough to hold professional and children’s work within one joyful world. Working with Field on the visual identity, we focused on the story: each child’s artwork ‘escaping’ both the frame of the museum and the format of biodiversity loss, journeying instead into a new shared digital habitat. We wanted the design system to feel democratic and dynamic - equally at home in classrooms, on gallery walls, or on a 60‑foot screen in Piccadilly Circus (which was a pretty special moment tbh).
A phased rollout
Phase one focused on schools and museums; resourcing teachers, building toolkits, and helping museums across the country deliver workshops with children. Phase two brought the work into the public realm, through; out‑of‑home, digital advertising and media partnerships - encouraging families to explore, visit and take part in the Wild World.
Impact
Funded in larger part by Arts Council England’s largest ever National Lottery grant to a museums project, The Wild Escape became a genuinely national moment; reaching over 50 million people through BBC Wild Isles, WWF partnerships, social amplification and out‑of‑home placements, including a 60‑foot takeover of Piccadilly Lights.
More than 500 museums took part, involving nearly 100,000 children in co‑creating an ever‑growing digital artwork. The project brought new audiences into museums, with 33% of schools engaging for the first time and 40% of visitors coming from lower‑engaged segments.
It also sparked remarkable artistic collaborations — including Es Devlin, FKA Twigs, Heather Phillipson, Rana Begum, Mollie Ray, Yinka Shonibare, Tai Shani, Clare Twomey, Mark Wallinger and Jeremy Deller — whose work was shown alongside that of 7–11‑year‑olds.
The result was a joyful, collective act of imagination that connected children, museums and the natural world at a scale the sector had never seen before.