Visitors to Wimbledon this year were treated to more than just great tennis - they got to see an innovative photo installation along side it. British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey unveiled three portraits of a Wimbledon player, official and coach - all developed and printed on grass.

The installation’s construction on the Wimbledon grounds.

How’d the pair do it? The images were created by projecting the image on grass as it grew in a darkroom.

“When grass gets plenty of sunlight, it produces chlorophyll and therefore turns green – but the less light it receives, the more yellow the colour is,” explains JWT art director Mark Norcutt, the agency behind the campaign. “Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey discovered that by projecting a bright black-and-white negative image onto a patch of grass as it grows (in an otherwise dark room), they can use the natural photosensitive properties of the grass to reproduce photographs

Each panel takes more than a week to form with constant exposure for 12 hours a day. Still, the effect is fleeting. The panels barely survived until the last days of the tournament, and the effect was almost all but unrecognizable by then. Don’t make this a pitstop for your next trip to London.

Interestingly, Harvey and Ackroyd have done a number of similar installations around the world. The afterlife installation, pictured below, involved prints of people crossing a popular crosswalk in London.

The pair’s Presence installation was grown and exposed in a Boston museum in the same space where the finished work was eventually put on display. The grass photo depicts a collection of centuries-old manuscripts.

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