Botanical Museum · Gallery exhibition

For a gallery exhibition in the Botanisches Museum Berlin-Dahlem, Niki Simpson presents 40 of her innovative digital botanical images, illustrating a wide range of plants.

An award-winning botanical artist, she demonstrates that botanical art can flourish in the digital era with an explosion of ideas and applications. Her new digital approach to botanical illustration has been described as groundbreaking. While botanical science today fully embraces computerised technology, botanical art has remained resolutely in the pre-digital era of pen and paintbrush.

Working in collaboration with botanist Peter Barnes, Niki’s new work contains features and insights made possible through digital imagery. She combines the scientific standards of traditional artwork with both photographic realism and the application of current technology to produce reference-standard work and commercial designs. These new works show a realism that no painting can match and yet are highly informative and accurate, with all parts shown to scale. Designed for screen viewing, interactivity and the future, these digitally created works have relevance, not only to botany, but also to those involved with education and the public understanding of science.

Niki holds the RHS Gold Medal (1998) for her traditional botanical watercolour paintings and first exhibited her work at a RHS London show in 1989. Her traditional artwork has been published on various occasions. She began exploring digital techniques for botanical art in 2003, with an award from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust. Currently she works part-time in the Botany Department of the Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley, in the UK, working with the RHS Herbarium image collection, whilst developing her own digital botanical illustration techniques and building up an extensive personal library of digital illustrative material.

In July 2005, Niki presented her new digital work to the XVII International Botanical Congress in Vienna. In May 2005 she was awarded the RHS Photographic Committee 2005 Bursary.