Zach Anderson
Mar 12, 2026 06:07
Leonardo.ai Creativeness Fund recipient Mia Forrest makes use of AI to domesticate digital orchid species, then transforms them into brass-embossed bodily works.
Australian artist Mia Forrest has accomplished her Leonardo.ai Creativeness Fund mission, coaching a customized AI mannequin on wild orchid specimens to generate solely new species—then urgent them into bodily brass-embossed artworks. The mission, titled Orchids, represents one in every of 5 globally funded works from the $10,000 grant program awarded in 2025.
Forrest, who works from her Byron Bay studio close to Nightcap Nationwide Park, fed open-source photographs from the Australasian Digital Herbarium right into a bespoke AI mannequin. The aim wasn’t digital artwork that lives on screens. She wished machine studying to perform as what she calls a “digital ecology”—cultivating orchid morphologies that by no means existed in nature.
“It is a registration of the presence of absence—these flowers by no means existed, but they depart a bodily hint,” Forrest mentioned.
From Pixels to Brass Plates
The interpretation course of proved costly and labor-intensive. Forrest had the AI-generated orchids machine-engraved onto brass plates, then blind-embossed into paper. The outcome sits someplace between botanical illustration and speculative biology—flowers that really feel actual sufficient to determine, but exist nowhere exterior her studio.
“As soon as the photographs have been generated, I wished to take them out of the digital house and switch them into one thing bodily that individuals may truly expertise,” she defined.
For collectors monitoring Forrest’s market trajectory, her credentials span each conventional and digital artwork worlds. Sotheby’s auctioned her Blue Waterlily piece in July 2025, and her work has appeared at Unit London, Artwork Basel (through Nationwide Geographic and TIME partnerships), and the Cannes AVIFF Artwork Pageant. Her 2021 NFT assortment Bloom bought out and trended on Basis.
Why This Issues for AI Artwork
The Orchids mission demonstrates one thing collectors ought to watch: artists more and more treating AI not as an endpoint however as one step in multi-medium workflows. Forrest’s method—coaching fashions on curated datasets, then fabricating bodily objects—creates shortage that purely digital work struggles to realize.
Her earlier Stitching as Storage collection encoded ecological knowledge into hand-embroidered textiles, suggesting a constant curiosity in how data transforms throughout mediums. The orchid mission extends that logic to generative AI.
Forrest holds finalist standing from the 2024 Arab Financial institution Switzerland Digital Artwork Prize and gained the Tweed Regional Artwork Gallery Rising Artist Award in 2022. Her video work has been licensed by Normal Imaginative and prescient in LA and sugarglider.digital in Australia for immersive installations.
Exhibition dates for associated work run by April 27, 2025, with further showings scheduled into 2026. No pricing knowledge exists but for the Orchids embossed works.
Picture supply: Shutterstock
