Last week, the BBC revealed the Denton Universal Award - the largest single source of public art funding in the UK. Its ambition is beautifully simple and quietly radical: to fund free, accessible works that anyone can experience. No tickets. No barriers. No velvet ropes.
The first recipient is Andy Goldsworthy, awarded £200,000 to create Gravestones in the hills of Dumfries and Galloway. Built from thousands of stones displaced during grave digging, the work will form a stark, 25-metre square enclosure - a place for mourning, remembrance, and stillness.
It’s not art made to be owned.
It’s art made to be visited.
And more importantly, felt.
Art That Steps Back - So Nature Can Speak
Goldsworthy’s work has always lived outside the gallery system. He works with land, weather, time and decay. His materials are temporary. His collaborators are wind, rain, frost and gravity.
This isn’t a rejection of culture - it’s a deeper commitment to place.
Gravestones doesn’t impose itself on the landscape. It listens to it. Stones taken from the earth are returned, rearranged with care, and left to weather alongside everything else on the hill.
That idea - of removal followed by restoration - sits at the heart of this new award. It’s a reminder that art, at its best, doesn’t dominate environments. It deepens our relationship with them.
Why This Matters to LettsSafari
At LettsSafari, we recognise the same philosophy.
We believe nature doesn’t need spectacle to matter.
It doesn’t need to be fenced off, branded, or over-explained.
And it certainly doesn’t need to be “saved” through grand gestures alone.
Real ecological change happens through patience. Through presence. Through giving landscapes - and species - the conditions to recover in their own time.
Goldsworthy’s work mirrors what rewilding teaches us every day:
Work with what’s already there
Value slowness over control
Accept impermanence as part of the process
Rewilding isn’t about forcing outcomes. It’s about stepping back deliberately.
Access, Without Extraction
The Denton Universal Award removes art from the market and returns it to people. No ownership. No exclusivity. Just access.
That principle matters in nature too.
Too often, our relationship with the natural world is extractive - take the view, take the resource, take the moment, move on. Rewilding asks something different: care without possession.
LettsSafari exists to make that kind of relationship possible. By supporting long-term restoration projects, and by helping people rewild gardens, balconies, and shared spaces, we’re creating access to nature that doesn’t rely on ownership or perfection.
Just participation.
A Shared Belief
Goldsworthy’s Gravestones will sit quietly on a hill. No signage shouting for attention. No rush. No payoff.
You’ll have to walk to it.
Stand with it.
Notice what’s changed since the last visitor.
That’s not so different from watching wildflowers return. Or birds reappear. Or soil slowly heal.
The Denton Universal Award is creating the right conditions for meaning in physical space.
LettsSafari is doing the same for nature - at every scale.
Different disciplines.
Same instinct.
Sometimes the most powerful act is simply to make space - and let the world respond.