Holly Veselka is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who creatively studies the entangled relationships between humans, technology, and the natural world. Her projects theorize that technology acts as an unintentional mirror that reflects the values and limits of the culture that creates it. When directed toward the natural world—to digitally capture or simulate organisms, geologies, or ecologies—thech often produces distortions, erasures, and hallucinations, revealing more about the cultural values of tech’s creators than about the entities they depict.

Veselka’s process involves feeding diverse archives—such as natural history collections, found organic and cultural objects, field photographs, and historical images—into emerging technologies including photogrammetry, AI image generators, simulation software, 3D printers, and CNC machines. Her practice is experimental and open-ended; rather than seeking predetermined results, she searches for evidence of how these systems engage with, translate, and misinterpret non-human life. The resulting works become visual artifacts of the biases and blind spots inherent in the tools themselves. These technological misreadings of non-human life reveal how contemporary Western humanity situates itself both within and apart from the more-than-human world.

For over fifteen years, Veselka has developed an interdisciplinary, collaborative practice that combines animation, AI, sculpture, installation, and ecological fieldwork. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with exhibitions at the Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Fotofest (Houston, TX), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Artpace (San Antonio, TX), Lage Egal (Berlin, Germany), and the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY). She has participated in residencies and fellowships such as the British Council’s X-Change program (Scotland, UK), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), and ACRE (Steuben, WI). Her work has also received support from organizations including the Puffin Foundation (Teaneck, NJ) and the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation (New York, NY).

This portfolio site features a selection of projects created since 2019, presented in reverse chronological order.

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Lost Thicket is a multichannel new media installation commissioned by the San Antonio Botanical Garden for the 2025 exhibition Reflections in Nature. Installed in the Garden’s preserved nineteenth-century East Texas log cabin, the work reflects on the incompleteness of ecological archives, focusing on southern pine forests where rapid logging erased species before they could be recorded. This compression of time—industrial extraction collapsing millennia of biodiversity into mere decades—renders the Piney Woods archive as a site of absence.

Merging sacred architecture, ecological loss, and digital artifice, Lost Thicket creates a subtly unsettling environment that questions how digital technologies reshape our ways of perceiving, remembering, and imagining the real.



Lost Thicket, installation shot, wooden panels and 3D printed relief in bio plastics, Piney Woods Cabin, Botanical Garden, San Antonio, TX; courtesy of the artist