Artist
‘I wanted to make art for pollinators, not about them. Pollinator Pathmaker is an ambitious art-led campaign to make living artworks for other species to enjoy. Can the audience for an artwork be more-than-human? And how can art be useful in the ecological crisis?’
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Her work explores subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, conservation, biodiversity, and evolution, as she investigates the human impulse to ‘better’ the world.
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg at the Eden Project, Cornwall, autumn 2021. Photo: © Steve Tanner.
To create Pollinator Pathmaker, Ginsberg was inspired by Eden’s core principles: encouraging a sense of connection, awe, and jeopardy towards our natural world, and above all giving us hope and agency to protect it. Ginsberg painted every plant in the artwork, and several Pollinator Pathmaker limited edition prints will be made available for purchase soon.
Preparatory sketch by the artist, 2020.
Ginsberg’s recent works include resurrecting the smell of extinct flowers, rebuilding the dawn chorus using machine learning, and a simulation of wilding the planet Mars over one million years. Complex projects that involve collaborating with scientists and using emerging technologies to challenge our understanding of ‘nature’ are a recurring feature of her work.
She spent over ten years experimentally engaging with the field of synthetic biology and is lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014). She received her PhD by practice from the Royal College of Art in 2018.
Ginsberg won the World Technology Award for design in 2011, the London Design Medal for Emerging Talent 2012, and the Dezeen Changemaker Award 2019. Twice nominated for Designs of the Year (2011, 2015), her work has been described as ‘romantic, dangerous… and everything else that inspires us to change and question the world’. She has exhibited at MoMA New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of China, the Centre Pompidou, and the Royal Academy, and her first solo show was at the Vitra Design Museum in 2019. Her work is in permanent collections that include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and ZKM Karlsruhe. Ginsberg is a resident at Somerset House Studios, London.