Isa Kost is an Italian artist who explores the visible and invisible natural world, mixing analog techniques such as printmaking, collage and embroidery with digital media. She approaches her practice as an explorer, likening herself to someone setting out to discover new lands or new species of plants and animals.
After studying art and graduating in architecture, she approached blockchain in 2018 through the social network Steemit, where she met crypto-art artists and discovered Dada.art, a platform built around communication through drawing. From 2019 to 2023 she collaborated with Dada and its associated artist collective on collective works, contributing to festivals and exhibitions.At the same time she pursued her own artistic practice on blockchain, presenting work through platforms including Makersplace, KnownOrigin, Foundation and Zeroone.Before turning her focus more fully to art, she worked as a commissioned graphic designer. She has described the social side of NFTs as what she values most, saying it introduced her to people who are important in her life, with whom she has “relationships of respect, trust, and friendship”.
In 2019 she became a member of the Dada Collective, an international group of artists who make collective work on Dada.art.That year she was one of eighteen artists credited on Screens: An Exploration, a collaborative work made for Dada.nyc.With the collective she took part in a live drawing performance inspired by the Nam June Paik exhibition at Tate Modern, staged at the invitation of Tate and MoCDA. She also contributed to Soul in the Machine, a 2019 multimedia performance by 19 artists created in real time for the Ethereal Summit in New York.In 2021 she contributed the piece Verbena to Venus Skins, a collaboration between five female artists made for the exhibition “Venus of Metaverse” and shown on Cryptovoxels.
Her Organs series, begun in April 2021, grew out of a dialogue with her own body, giving voice to what she calls its inner parts.,The Cocoons series was made during the COVID-19 lockdown and takes the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly as a metaphor for transformation. In Rooting in My Imagination she pictures the body's nervous, circulatory and lymphatic systems as trees moving through the four seasons. Her series You Can Change the Story rewrites the endings of tragic literary heroines in pieces such as Ophelia is alive! and Cho Cho-San is alive!.Wunderkammer (2025), released through Sovrn, is a fully on-chain cabinet of wonders: 108 objects, each a dead memory or presence she has carried — a ficus leaf, a sun spider, a gardenia — granted permanence on Ethereum; its Sacred Foot has entered the permanent collection of the Francisco Carolinum museum in Linz.
