Zach Anderson
Mar 12, 2026 06:07
Leonardo.ai Imagination Fund recipient Mia Forrest uses AI to cultivate digital orchid species, then transforms them into brass-embossed physical works.
Australian artist Mia Forrest has completed her Leonardo.ai Imagination Fund project, training a custom AI model on wild orchid specimens to generate entirely new species—then pressing them into physical brass-embossed artworks. The project, titled Orchids, represents one of five globally funded works from the $10,000 grant program awarded in 2025.
Forrest, who works from her Byron Bay studio near Nightcap National Park, fed open-source images from the Australasian Virtual Herbarium into a bespoke AI model. The goal wasn’t digital art that lives on screens. She wanted machine learning to function as what she calls a “digital ecology”—cultivating orchid morphologies that never existed in nature.
“It’s a registration of the presence of absence—these flowers never existed, yet they leave a physical trace,” Forrest said.
From Pixels to Brass Plates
The translation process proved expensive and labor-intensive. Forrest had the AI-generated orchids machine-engraved onto brass plates, then blind-embossed into paper. The result sits somewhere between botanical illustration and speculative biology—flowers that feel real enough to identify, yet exist nowhere outside her studio.
“Once the images were generated, I wanted to take them out of the digital space and turn them into something physical that people could actually experience,” she explained.
For collectors tracking Forrest’s market trajectory, her credentials span both traditional and digital art worlds. Sotheby’s auctioned her Blue Waterlily piece in July 2025, and her work has appeared at Unit London, Art Basel (via National Geographic and TIME partnerships), and the Cannes AVIFF Art Festival. Her 2021 NFT collection Bloom sold out and trended on Foundation.
Why This Matters for AI Art
The Orchids project demonstrates something collectors should watch: artists increasingly treating AI not as an endpoint but as one step in multi-medium workflows. Forrest’s approach—training models on curated datasets, then fabricating physical objects—creates scarcity that purely digital work struggles to achieve.
Her previous Stitching as Storage series encoded ecological data into hand-embroidered textiles, suggesting a consistent interest in how information transforms across mediums. The orchid project extends that logic to generative AI.
Forrest holds finalist status from the 2024 Arab Bank Switzerland Digital Art Prize and won the Tweed Regional Art Gallery Emerging Artist Award in 2022. Her video work has been licensed by Standard Vision in LA and sugarglider.digital in Australia for immersive installations.
Exhibition dates for related work run through April 27, 2025, with additional showings scheduled into 2026. No pricing data exists yet for the Orchids embossed works.
Image source: Shutterstock
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