Growth is rarely tidy or predictable. Every fruit or flower, fungi, and fern is held up by a secret world we cannot see, anchored by gnarled roots underground. What happens beneath the surface can be just as beautiful, and much stranger, than what we see above. While plants grow vertically chasing the sunlight, root systems reach out towards one another, building community. It is these systems of connection that make all life on — and in — Earth not only possible but also extraordinary.

The Deep Roots, Wild Bloom theme honors that to know where you’re going, you need to show where you’ve been; to achieve our wildest dreams, we draw strength from the soil that has nourished us. True/False has grown strong, and survived years of historic and global adversity, by reaching into our past, out to our community, and up towards the sky.

By staying true to our identity and our moral compass, we find the structure and support needed to let the spirit of experimentation and collaboration burst wide open, year after year.

The 2027 festival will explore the ways we grow: individually, collectively, across generations and spiritual ancestors. This theme invites you to look deeper; to journey underground, sift through the soil, compost those fragments of memory, history, and emotion, and return to the world transformed.

Prompts:

1. Spring renewal
2. Radicle is radical
3. Root systems and rhizomatic figures
4. Botanical and anatomical illustrations
5. Evolution and metamorphosis
6. Biodiversity is a necessity for survival
7. Hybridity as creative provocation
8. The obsessive geometry of nature: fractals and spirals
9. The human plant: branching veins and respiratory trees
10. Bizarre flora: venus flytraps, corpse flowers, ghost pipes
11. Miraculous fauna: immortal jellyfish, electric eels
12. The subterranean: caves, caverns, and tunnels
13. Maximalism, excess, over-ripeness
14. Mixed prints and power clashing
15. High-contrast color palettes
16. Artifacts of worlds past,  buried underground
17. Archaeology, excavation, treasure hunting
18. Breaking through
19. The crack is how the light gets in
20. Collage as biomimicry
21. Collision and confluence: natural and industrial, digital against analogue