Sam Falls in Conversation With Nature: Ruinart’s Art Basel Miami Collaboration

At Art Basel Miami Beach, where spectacle often competes with substance, Ruinart’s collaboration with Sam Falls offers something quieter, slower, and more resonant. Presented as part of the Maison’s ongoing Conversations with Nature series, Falls’ site-specific works—created in direct contact with the elements—invite viewers to reconsider time, impermanence, and humanity’s evolving relationship with the natural world. And we were able to meet with Sam Falls at the Ruinart activation in the exclusive Collector’s Lounge at Art Basel Miami Beach.

For nearly 300 years, Ruinart has cultivated a dialogue with nature through its champagne, rooted in observation, patience, and terroir. In 2025, that dialogue extends into contemporary art through Falls, whose practice transforms plants, rain, sunlight, and place itself into collaborators rather than subjects.

Falls’ path toward working with nature was not inevitable. Trained as a conceptual artist in New York, his early practice was steeped in theory and photography—until a pivotal realization reframed his approach.

A critique from artist and mentor Nayland Blake crystallized that tension: you don’t have to prove you’re smart. The idea that a grandmother should be able to enjoy the work as much as a curator prompted Falls to abandon the camera altogether. What followed was a radical simplification—working outdoors, with no mediation between artwork and viewer.

By removing the lens, the printer, and even the studio, Falls found immediacy. Sunlight became exposure. Weather became process. Plants became markers of both place and time—each leaf and bloom carrying seasonal specificity that no caption could replicate.

Light plays a central role across Falls’ oeuvre, not as illumination but as an agent of decay. “Light is kind of what runs our lives,” he says, describing it as inseparable from time—his greatest anxiety.

Rather than attempting to resolve that anxiety, Falls embraces it. His work functions as a Sisyphean gesture, an ongoing negotiation with time’s inevitability. Like love and death, time becomes a recurring theme not to be conquered but expressed. The resulting works offer an empathetic exchange between artist and viewer—an acknowledgment of shared vulnerability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Ruinart. For this collaboration, Falls created the paintings on site at the Maison’s historic Taissy vineyard in Champagne—a landscape undergoing ecological transformation through vitiforestry, soil regeneration, and biodiversity initiatives.

Working directly on the ground, Falls arranged local leaves, flowers, and branches across expansive canvases, spraying them with pigment and allowing humidity, rain, and time to leave their mark. The resulting impressions capture both the ephemeral beauty of the natural world and Ruinart’s long-term commitment to sustainability.

The compositions themselves reference the region’s cultural and architectural heritage. Oblong forms echo the stained-glass windows of Reims Cathedral, while arched structures recall the chalk cellars beneath Ruinart’s historic estate—spaces that left a lasting impression on the artist during his time there.

What distinguishes this partnership is not branding but alignment. “We had a lot of shared values,” Falls notes, citing Ruinart’s acknowledgment of climate change and active investment in biodiversity. The vineyard is not merely a backdrop but a living system—one where hedgerows, trees, and diverse plant life coexist with vines to regenerate soil and foster resilience.

The paintings themselves become testaments to that effort, incorporating not only vineyard flora but a broader ecosystem of plants present on site. In this way, the works document a moment in environmental stewardship as much as they do an artistic process.

While Art Basel Miami marks a significant moment, Falls’ practice remains in constant evolution. Upcoming projects include a Tokyo exhibition inspired by Ikebana and ceramic works that extend his interest in plants beyond representation.

These ceramic vessels, imprinted with plant imagery from Falls’ own garden or places of creation, are designed to hold living flowers sourced from wherever they are exhibited. The result is a work that remains unfinished—activated seasonally by curators and collectors, shifting with geography and time.

“It’s a different site specificity,” Falls explains—one that resists permanence and invites continued participation.