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Debora Hirsch's practice focuses on biodiversity preservation and endangered species. In seeking to restore the complexity of the real, her work draws on botanical, ecological, historical, and cultural studies through a methodology grounded in investigation, reinterpretation, and theoretical reflection.

 

Her recent research develops within the evolving field of Plant Humanities, where she examines the shifting relationship with plant life. Working with drawing and painting, AI models, proprietary datasets, algorithmic processes, and animation, she explores the structures of artistic storytelling that can emerge in response to the commodification of plants, our collective obliviousness to vegetal life, and the lack of reverence for the nonhuman world through an inquiry into the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of extinction.

 

Her sources include herbaria, scientific archives, rare books, digital repositories, textual materials, visual materials from expeditions, while conversations with humanists and botanists often shape the conceptual architecture of my work. In her work, beauty sharpens attention and draws the viewer into the life of plants.

 

In the Plant series, she generates AI-based compositions using a model fine-tuned with her datasets. She combine these proliferations into singular visual statements that are recorded on the blockchain, creating a permanent virtual archive of plants we risk losing. The Sylva Bird in her works emerge algorithmically as unsolicited feral birds, symbols of life beyond our control, and agency embedded in generative systems.

In the Plantalia project, the plants are presented in a state of perpetual transformation, evoking the temporal instability of threatened ecologies, while in Herbaria, the archival specimens are temporarily revived, only to vanish again, confronting the irreversibility of extinction.

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Her recent research, Vanishing Trees, developed in collaboration with scholar Lucas Mertehikian of the New York Botanical Garden, is situated within the field of Plant Humanities. The installation centers on three monumental trees and approaches them as subjects rather than objects of observation. Drawing on botanical, historical, and cultural sources, Hirsch constructs a visual and textual narrative around the three species, allowing the trees to appear as the agents. The visual sequence abandons the human viewpoint, moving instead through non-human fields of vision: from the tree itself to the surrounding ecosystem, neighboring trees, animals, and pollinators.

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In June and July 2025, she was an artist-in-residence at RU Residency Unlimited, in New York, under the mentorship of Lucas Mertehikian at the New York Botanical Garden. 

In July and August 2026, she will be an artist-in-residence at Oak Spring Garden Foundation.