THE ARK OF EXTINCTION

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Turning street art into action for endangered animals.

The Ark of Extinction began in June 2024 with a single question: how can urban walls become platforms for awareness around endangered species?

With that in mind I created an artistic movement that raises awareness of endangered species through street art. Each mural takes one animal in trouble and puts it somewhere people cannot avoid it: a car park, a nature reserve, a town centre. Anywhere it can be seen at a scale that stops you walking past. The work is rendered in my black-and-white bone doodle style, dense and intricate, so that a passerby who glances at it sees the species' plight defined by the very bones that create it.

The project grew out of Leake Street, the graffiti tunnel beneath Waterloo Station where I am artist-in-residence. That space works by constant overpainting: nothing survives, everything is temporary, and the energy comes from the turnover rather than the permanence. The first mural in this series, the critically endangered vaquita porpoise, was painted there, and the tunnel's logic runs through everything since. A mural will not last. Neither will the species, if nothing changes. That was the poetic point.

ART

We use the reach of street art to engage, educate and hold attention where a leaflet would be dropped.

AWARENESS

We tell the story of one animal at a time, with the specifics: why it is struggling, who is fighting for it, and what actually helps.

ACTIVISM

We point directly at the organisations doing the unglamorous long-term work, and send people to them.

WHY IT WORKS

• Conservation starts with awareness, and awareness starts with curiosity. Curiosity creates conversations, and conversations create learning.

• A mural cannot save a species. What it can do is focus attention where there was none, through a collaborative model that sustains itself.

GET INVOLVED

• The Ark of Extinction takes collaboration as its core principle. If you know a wall, a species, or an organisation that should be part of it, we would like to hear from you.

FIND OUT MORE

thearkofextinction.com

@thearkofextinction

THE MURALS SO FAR

VAQUITA PORPOISE

Leake Street, London. The first in the series, and the world's most endangered marine mammal.

RED SQUIRREL

Redruth, Cornwall, February 2025. Unveiled during the St Piran's Day Festival in partnership with Redruth Council, in support of Red Squirrel South West.

BARN OWL

Bog Meadows Nature Reserve, Belfast, March 2025. Fewer than thirty breeding pairs remain in Northern Ireland. Painted in support of Ulster Wildlife.

BASKING SHARK

Maritime Museum Car Park, Falmouth, Cornwall, May 2025. The second-largest fish in the world, feeding in British waters most people never think about, in support of the Shark Trust.

BLUE WHALE

Ceiling of Leake Street, Waterloo, London, June 2025. The world's biggest animal, and so big I had to take ten metres off it to fit the tunnel.