Touch grass? Sorry, this garden is made of scrap metal

If you’ve ever been told to go touch grass, Gul politely offers an alternative: touch metal. Currently showing at Method gallery in Delhi, this exhibition is a garden built entirely out of things most people throw away. Think poppies forged from factory scrap, fountains made of broken mirrors, and flowers blooming out of X-ray films. It’s nature hacked and reassembled for a world that forgot to water the real thing.

The minds behind it are Ritu Singh, 46, and Surya Singh, 47, the husband-wife duo behind Jaipur-based art collective Wolf. Long before they were welding poppies, they were running a bar called Flow at the Jaipur Literature Festival. A patron spotted their talent and nudged them into art full-time. The name Wolf came later, and almost accidentally. “We used to run Flow, and one day we realised if you flip the word, it becomes Wolf. Wolves forage, they survive as a pack, and they are led by an alpha male and alpha female. So, it stuck,” Surya explains.

Their latest exhibit is simply a mirror reflecting how we quietly let gardens disappear while we water our indoor succulents and chase better Wi-Fi. India once designed entire cities around charbaghs (gardens with running water), poetry, political gossip, and sometimes a pair of forbidden lovers behind a fig tree. Then came colonial lawn culture, with its trimmed grass and trimmed opinions. The trees went, the fountains dried, and the benches were replaced with fences. The loss was not only botanical, it was also cultural. While talking about Gul, Ritu gently points out another irony. “We have this conversation in English, and I couldn’t have it with as much command in my own mother tongue, Hindi.” Even resistance, it seems, must pass through colonial grammar.

Eighteenth-century poet Mir Taqi Mir is the quiet heartbeat of Gul. The idea for the collection began when a book of his poetry found its way into their Jaipur studio. Ritu recalls that Mir was known as the “romancer of Delhi”, a poet who wrote of longing and fragile beauty even as the city around him was ravaged by Nader Shah’s invasion, Abdali’s raids, and later British plunder. “Patta patta, buuta buuta, haal hamara jaane hai/ jaane na jaane, gul hi na jaane, baagh to saara jaane hai” (every leaf, every bud that grows in the garden knows of my state. It’s only the flower that is unaware) he once wrote. His verses were born in the shadow of ruin, yet they chose tenderness over despair. “Somewhere I think the connect was that… seeing beauty in a hardened world and enduring in spite of it all,” she adds.

Walk into the exhibit and the first thing you notice is the smell of roses. Real rose petals are scattered along the gallery walls, so the room smells like a garden even though everything growing out of it is forged from scrap. However, in Gul, the flowers are not here to look pretty. They are here for the strategic plot. We live in a world where saying the wrong thing, or even the true thing, can prove costly, so art becomes the loophole. ‘Flowerspeak’ is exactly that—a floral encryption system. Each metal bloom corresponds to a letter of the alphabet, forming couplets by Mir Taqi Mir that can be decoded using the notes available in the gallery. As Ritu puts it, “As artists, we must be able to reflect the times that we’re in. And these are the times that we’re in. We do need a coded language to speak, and I’m so proud of ourselves that it’s a language of flowers, of love, and of beauty.”

And if flowers can speak, they can also flirt. ‘Lovers in the Garden’ imagines a charbagh where 377 metal pansies reclaim the right to exist. They lie across faded ledger paper, arranged like a Mughal garden that also suspiciously resembles the Union Jack. Section 377, written into law by the British in 1857, criminalised queer love until 2018. The pansies respond, politely yet firmly, by blooming anyway. The cheeky digs continue in ‘Resting Place’, a gun built using lawnmower parts. Colonisers replaced fruiting charbaghs with obedient lawns, and centuries later we are still trimming grass like it is a moral obligation.

Several works in Gul take the shape of a charbagh, but none with conventional materials. ‘Tear Fed’ turns a moth-eaten Kashmiri shawl into a map of paradise, stitched with scrap brass jewellery, mirrors, and beads. ‘The Eternal Garden’ follows the same layout, only this time with vintage ledger paper, shaving blades and flowers that refuse to wilt. And in ‘Can I Call You Rose’, the garden returns once again, except the centre is left empty, a void to mark everything history took and never gave back.

At Wolf Jaipur, sustainability is not a keyword. It is simply how things are done. They build from what already exists. “We had so many old things lying and there was the idea of why we should get new. Let us use what we have and think of new ways of putting it out,” Ritu says. This way of thinking began at The Farm, their home and studio just outside Jaipur, long before the word ‘upcycling’ became an Instagram hashtag.

The Farm, which started as a blueprint for a concept hotel, itself grew from loss and memory. Surya’s ancestral house near Udaipur was submerged during the Mahi Dam project, and his father salvaged what he could—doors, beams, windows—some over 200 years old. Those pieces now hold up The Farm. Neither Ritu nor Surya studied art. They learned by bending metal, breaking it, and trying again. Wolf was born here in 2013, not as a company but because they could not stop making things.

Nothing at The Farm is symmetrical. A bar turned into a kitchen. Guest rooms became family rooms. Iron sheep and poppies stand around like permanent residents. Materials arrive from flea markets, junkyards, roadside scrap, forests, forgotten cupboards, and whatever crosses their path. “Bits of everything,” they say. Sometimes an artwork begins with an idea. Other times, with a chance discovery. “There is a whole piece ready and one part missing, and suddenly it is sitting at a roadside stall under a chadar,” Ritu says, laughing.

The duo often found inspiration in Mughal miniature paintings, but their scale is anything but miniature. Works like ‘Tear Fed’ span almost 6 x 6.6 feet and ‘Can I Call You Rose’, over eight feet long, is taller than most door frames. Their earlier installations were even more ambitious. In their early years, Wolf created metal poppies towering over people, forests made from discarded paper, rooms turned into living installations. Their work has appeared across the country, from O Pedro in Mumbai to Pepper House in Kochi, in schools, hotels, and even street corners.

In 2024, they created ‘Bombay Rising’ for Art Mumbai, where 1,100 metal poppies bloomed at the racecourse. At the 2023 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, their installation ‘Eye Spy’ used palm leaves, Theyyam scraps, film negatives, and fishing buoys to ask viewers to unlearn and look again. These were works you could walk through but never take home. It was only after working with Srila Chatterjee of Baro Art that they realised people wanted to take a piece of their world home. The 17 pieces that make up Gul do not rush to heal or conclude. They linger. They let the silence sit. And they remind us that gardens were once places of shade, poetry and public life, and somewhere along the way we traded them for fences, lawns and ticketed entry.

And that’s where Wolf stands, not in mourning but in rebuilding. They do not write manifestos or wait for perfect conditions. They gather what the world discards and begin again. No formal training. No blueprint. Only persistence, rust, and a poet from the 18th century whispering in their ear.