Pollinator Pathmaker

The artwork is part of the Create a Buzz programme at Eden Project, supported by the Garfield Weston Foundation, that seeks to communicate the story of the UK’s native pollinators: their vital role, their current plight and their restoration.   

Pollinator Pathmaker was originally commissioned by the Eden Project funded by the Garfield Weston Foundation as part of Create a Buzz. Additional funding supporters Gaia Art Foundation and collaborators Google Arts & Culture.

Following the planting of the inaugural artwork in Cornwall, further ‘editioned’ gardens will be sown across the UK and Europe.

Pollinator Pathmaker asks visitors to view the world in a different way; from the perspective of plants and pollinators, and to take part in an international cultural campaign to help save bees and other endangered species of pollinating insects ‒ the first of its kind. There has been a dramatic decline in pollinating insects in the last 40 years due to habitat loss, pesticides, invasive species, and climate change and the artwork is a call to take action against this. 

The living artwork at the Eden Project comprises a new garden, designed, planted and optimised for pollinators’ tastes, using a specially designed algorithm and specially curated palette of plants.  

The garden is now welcoming its first human visitors, and crucially, it's first pollinators - including bees, moths, beetles and wasps.

You can also be part of this unique artwork and create, plant and share your own garden and planting scheme, designed for bees and other insect pollinators, using the new website and algorithm at pollinator.art, an experiment developed in collaboration with the Google Arts and Culture Lab. It is hoped people will grow these in whatever space they have available - at home, fields, community gardens and more.  

Using the website, you can use the artwork’s custom algorithm to generate your own unique planting scheme of locally-appropriate plants for bees and other pollinators, as a call to action to plant your own pollinator garden. The algorithm will create a planting design to support the maximum pollinator species possible, using plants from a curated selection of plants chosen for their benefits to pollinators. You can see a 3D visualization of your unique garden bloom on your screen, created from paintings of each plant by Ginsberg, who has carefully researched thousands of species. The website has been developed by The Workers with visual identity by Studio Frith.  

On the website, you can also watch your digital garden change over the year, as flowers for different pollinators emerge in an animated seasonal view. A soundscape composed by award-winning sound artist Nick Ryan accompanies the work and audiences can explore how a garden might look through the eyes of insects. Some of the plants included on the site include endangered plants such as the Echium pininana, which is a rare example of a plant which produces nectar across the whole day. Another included is the Cynara cardunculus, a type of artichoke, which is a valuable source of nectar for bumblebees. The Stachys byzantina meanwhile, is a magnet for wool carder bees in particular.  

Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects, Ginsberg’s work explores subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, conservation, and evolution, as she investigates the human impulse to “better” the world. 

Ginsberg spent over ten years experimentally engaging with the field of synthetic biology, developing new roles for artists and designers. She is lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014), and in 2017 completed Better, her PhD by practice, at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA), interrogating how powerful dreams of “better” futures shape the things that get designed. She read architecture at the University of Cambridge, was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and received her MA in Design Interactions from the RCA. 

Ginsberg won the World Technology Award for design in 2011, the London Design Medal for Emerging Talent in 2012, and the Dezeen Changemaker Award 2019. Her work has twice been nominated for Designs of the Year (2011, 2015), with Designing for the Sixth Extinction described as “romantic, dangerous… and everything else that inspires us to change and question the world”. Ginsberg exhibits internationally, including at MoMA New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of China, the Centre Pompidou, and the Royal Academy, and her work is in museum and private collections. Talks include TEDGlobal, PopTech, Design Indaba, and the New Yorker Tech Fest. Daisy is a resident at Somerset House Studios, London. 

For more information visit Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's website 

Top image: Royston Hunt