Gallery Entry
Orchids
By Mia Forrest · AU
At nearly 30,000 species, orchids are among the world’s most diverse plant families, captivating human desire through centuries of cultivation and hybridisation. If these processes have long been driven by human intervention, what new morphologies might emerge when the cultivator becomes a machine? What does the machine “see” — or perhaps even “desire” — when confronted with the taxonomic structures, visual conventions and preserved specimens of the herbarium archive? 𝔒𝔯𝔠𝔥𝔦𝔡𝔰 examines cultivation as it migrates from the botanical into the technological domain, positioning machine learning as a continuum site of cultivation. AI is used within this work as one stage in a broader, artist- and materially directed process rather than as an autonomous image-making system. Engaging with the open-image photographic archive of wild Australian orchid specimens held in the New South Wales Herbarium, a custom dataset was curated to train a LoRA model, with the intention of engaging machine learning as a digital ecology “cultivating” orchid morphologies. The selected orchids were then removed from the generative environment and materially reworked: the model’s digital outputs are vectorised and inscribed by machine onto brass plates. Each plate functions as a die for blind embossing onto paper, a printmaking process that creates relief without ink. These brass plates were subsequently used in a traditional printmaking process to create blind embossings on paper. The raised reliefs appear as traces of forms that never existed, registering the presence of absence. Together, the sculptural brass dies and works on paper are preserved as tactile, fossilised records of the model’s cultivated orchids, mirroring the ontologies of preservation found in the original herbarium dataset. AI operates as a tool of cultivation within a process in which the conceptual, aesthetic and material decisions remain my own.