Biodiversity Art: Making Art About Nature in an Age of Extinction

Most of the plants, birds and insects in my installations were drawn more than a hundred years ago.

They come from natural history plates, the hand-coloured illustrations that naturalists published to describe the living world to people who would never see it. I find them in archives like the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and I bring them back at the scale of a room, so that you can stand inside a density of life that almost no one alive has experienced.

People often ask what to call this kind of work. Environmental art, botanical art, immersive installation. I think of it as biodiversity art: art that is about the variety of life itself, and about what it means to remember it while it disappears.

What is biodiversity art?

Biodiversity means the variety of life: species, the relationships between them, and the places they need. Biodiversity art takes that variety as its subject, not just a beautiful flower or a single animal, but the web that holds them together.

For me it has three parts. It is specific: real species from real places, named and correctly placed. It is relational: an otter with the fish it hunts, a bee with the sage it pollinates. And it is public: it brings people together around a living world they share, rather than sitting quietly on a wall.

It is not only an art of mourning. Some of the most important work in this field is celebratory, an exaltation of what is still here. I want people to walk into my installations and feel joy first. The grief can come after, and it often does.

Why abundance?

Monitored wildlife populations have fallen by an average of 73% since 1970, according to WWF's Living Planet Report. Numbers like that are hard to feel. We read them and move on.

In 1995 the marine biologist Daniel Pauly gave a name to part of the problem: the shifting baseline. Each generation takes the nature it grew up with as normal, so a depleted world slowly becomes the reference point. We cannot miss what we never saw.

That is why my installations are so dense. Research on green space and wellbeing has found that people's sense of restoration follows how rich in species a place feels to them, not only how rich it actually is. What matters is the experience of abundance. My rooms give people that experience, built from images made when abundance was still ordinary, so they can feel the gap for themselves.

The archive and its shadow

I love natural history plates. They are some of the most vivid records we have of how the world looked before industrial agriculture, before the great clearances of forests and wetlands.

But they were not made innocently. Many were produced by expeditions that collected, shipped and sold the living world to Europe, and the same networks that recorded tropical abundance helped to strip it. A plate is often drawn from a dead specimen, for a paying audience, far from the place it describes.

My recent works face that history directly. Gilded, Swarm and Enmesh (2026) began with a study showing that the blue of butterfly communities is fading from deforested parts of the Amazon, as species like the Morpho give way to greys and browns. The butterflies in those works come from plates published between 1835 and 1902, records of a world that is disappearing, made in the service of the extraction that helped destroy it. I want the work to hold both truths at once: the beauty, and the cost.

Art about nature, made in public

I call what I do ecological counter-memory: building a memory of the living world that pushes back against forgetting. It works best when it is made with the people who know a place.

Viriditas (Kunsttage Winningen, 2026) filled a 12th-century church on the Mosel with more than 2,000 naturalist illustrations, centred on the Apollo butterfly found only in the Moselle vineyards. A local writing group answered it with poems, and children from the village daycare came to find the animals hidden in it.
Impact at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where my installation closed the exhibition, brought the variety of life into a museum built to explain it.
Restorying: Waters of Demir Kapija (Skopje 2028) is being shaped with the conservation group Eko-svest and the Natural History Museum of North Macedonia, through excursions, herbarium days and public conversations before the work is unveiled.
In 2027 I will be the Martin Shallenberger Artist-in-Residence at Cheekwood Estate & Gardens in Nashville, developing a new installation with the garden's botanists.

The same visual language also works for brands and public spaces, from Cartier's Into the Wild in Miami to retail and hospitality commissions. Beauty is how people come in. What they take away is up to the work.

Others working in this field

Biodiversity art has a rich lineage, and I learn from it constantly:

Mark Dion has spent decades working inside natural history collections, turning cabinets and taxonomies into art.
Maria Thereza Alves, in Seeds of Change, grew plants from the ballast soil left in European ports by colonial shipping.
Uriel Orlow treats plants as political witnesses in Theatrum Botanicum.
Courtney Mattison builds monumental ceramic coral reefs to make ocean loss visible.
Es Devlin shows how a room, light and a few words can change how people think about the planet.

What connects us is a belief that art can do something data cannot: make people feel what is at stake, and want to protect it.

Work with me

I make immersive botanical installations for botanic gardens, natural history museums, cultural festivals and brands, often with a public programme built in. If you have a place, a collection or a story about the living world that deserves to be seen, get in touch.

Biodiversity Art