Cells of Life consists of eight landforms and a connecting causeway which surround four lakes and a flat parterre. The landforms mark the entrance to Jupiter Artland and reference the cellular process of mitosis.

Charles Jencks is among the UK’s most influential practitioners and theorists of art and architecture. He was a pioneer of ‘landforming’ as a synthesis of sculpture, garden design and conceptual thought. His large-scale landforms are inspired by prehistoric earthworks and by the most advanced scientific understandings of nature.

Viewed from above, the layout of Jencks’s contribution to Jupiter Artland reveals how cells divide and multiply, presenting the cell’s early division into membranes and nuclei in a monumental celebration of the microscopic basis of life.

Another example of Jencks’ landforms can also be seen at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art where his design Landform Ueda similarly marks the entrance to the Modern One Gallery.

“Landscape design has one great quality, which it took me some time to appreciate. Of all the arts it is the most cosmic.” Charles Jencks

“Feeling proceeds thought, emotion comes prior to understanding. But, as with all art, one can feel if there is more going on under the surface, things which only reveal themselves to those who care, those who are pulled forward by greater meaning. The strange attraction of designed landscape is to promise a journey from the senses to the mind. A pleasurable way to think without conscious labour; a way of relating to nature before you know it.” Charles Jencks