Mia Forrest is an Australian multidisciplinary artist based in the Northern Rivers region of Australia, on the edge of an ancient Gondwanan rainforest. Her practice treats ecological processes, such as plant biodata and cymatic forms, as co-authors of her work, following generative art theorist Philip Galanter's framework that treats a system, rule or process as an artistic collaborator. She works across textiles, pigments, digital media, metalwork and paper.
Forrest holds a Bachelor of Music in performance from the Queensland Conservatorium and a Masters in Film from Griffith Film School.Her early series Bloom applies slit-scan photography and time remapping to a set of 14 native Australian flowers, stretching the blooms into surreal, DNA-like helix forms that trace how species change and endure over time. The series was exhibited at Vellum LA, Tweed Regional Art Gallery and the Cannes AVIFF Art Festival.In 2022 she received the Emerging Artist Award at Tweed Regional Gallery's Wollumbin Art Award.,
Her series Stitching as Storage translates ecological data into hand-embroidered textile works. Wirrimbirra White, 2025, is composed of 7,360 hand-embroidered stitches on cotton cloth encoding the electrical-conductivity changes recorded from a rare white-flowering waratah, sonified into a rhythmic notation that uses two stitch colours as a binary code. The finished piece was inscribed as a Bitcoin Ordinal on the satoshi mined the day the plant's biodata was recorded.
In 2025 Forrest was one of five worldwide recipients of Leonardo.ai's Imagination Fund, receiving USD 10,000 to produce Orchids.,For the project she trained a custom AI model on open-source images of native orchids from the Australasian Virtual Herbarium and the National Herbarium of New South Wales, then had the generated forms machine-engraved onto brass plates and pressed into paper as blind-embossed works. “It's a registration of the presence of absence — these flowers never existed, yet they leave a physical trace.”Forrest has been a finalist in the HOFA Gallery and Phillips Digital Art Awards in 2025 and 2026, and her work was included in the 2024 group exhibition “The Path to the Present, 1954-2024” at Expanded.Art in Berlin.,,
