Natalie Jeremijenko is an eco-scientist, artist, and engineer whose background includes studies in physics, neuroscience, and precision engineering. Her experiments explore the mutualistic relationships between nature and humans and how new technologies can be used to improve human and environmental health, energy, food, and transportation systems. Jeremijenko spent June and July of 2022 at the Gardner as an Artist-in-Residence. Upon arrival, her inquisitive mind was kicked into high gear.
Natalie has described her work as ’X Design’ (short for experimental design) and herself as a ‘thingker’, a combination of thing-maker and thinker. Jeremijenko spent her time exploring the galleries and grounds, walking the city, and working on several projects – taking samples, recording her observations, and talking with people whom she met about their experiences. One of her first field trips was to visit the Museum’s greenhouses. Here she learned about the plant varieties the horticulturalists cultivate for the Courtyard, their growing cycles, and the team's use of predatory insects to help manage mites and aphids.
Another trip took her to Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline. Recognized as the founder of American landscape architecture and the nation's foremost parkmaker, Natalie was interested in seeing his workshop firsthand. She spent the afternoon exploring the building, speaking to the Park Rangers, and walking the property.
Back on site Jeremijenko set about recording her observations on life cycle events which, along with other data, she used to create a phenological clock of the area. This kind of clock displays the time that local organisms bud, bloom, emerge or migrate on a January through December clock face. These seasonal events are arranged in concentric circles, one for each species: flowering plants in the innermost circles; insects, the insects that are dependent on these are in the next set of circles; the birds, dependent on insectivorous resources are next; and then local trees and their large biomass and habitat provisions are positioned as the outermost rings.
Jeremijenko also began designing a site-specific project for the Gardner’s Façade space to be installed in June 2023. This work will be different from the usual flat printed vinyl sections, as it will incorporate a “living wall” that will attract pollinators. Jeremijenko fabricated a prototype to understand how the vinyl material behaved and researched potential plant species to incorporate into the planter pockets.
Another project Jeremijenko undertook during her residency was to collect samples from areas inside and outside the Museum building including walls and ductwork. This work is part of her ongoing research on environmental pollutants and where and how they manifest. It led her to the Museum’s archives where Jeremijenko found newspaper articles documenting the changes to the Fens. The land was a marshland developed to host Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court and later hospitals, schools and the new Museum of Fine Arts. She studied the Museum’s annual reports from 1925-1965; the building records; heating system structural work; and efforts spent over the years on air quality monitoring in the building. She also read correspondence between Director Morris Carter and the President of Simmons College discussing Carter’s concerns for the abundance of pests in the area in 1927 and later in 1929 for the smoke and soot coming through the windows from the schools new oil burners.
Natalie was in her element in the Conservation Labs. She and the Objects team connected over various forms of data collection and analysis and how lasers are being used to clean objects in the collection. She was also able to work with one of the conservators analyzing some of the samples she collected with an XRF machine - a compact, portable, and handheld X-ray fluorescence device used to determine the elemental composition of materials.
Jeremijenko returned in June 2023 to install The Declaration of Interdependence, her work for the Façade.
Natalie Jeremijenko (b. 1966, Australia) is an Officer (AO) of the Order of Australia awarded in 2018 by the governor-general on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II for “distinguished service to the arts, and to higher education, through pioneering contributions to architecture, technology, the sciences, and engineering, and to rural and urban design.”
Jeremijenko’s work has been installed, exhibited, and published in leading venues internationally. It has been included in two Whitney Biennials, MOMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Reina Sofia museum, MACBA, and CCCB among many others with solo retrospectives at the Neuberger Museum of Art and the Cummings Center for the Arts at Connecticut College. Her public art installations include Tree Logic at MASSMoCA; OneTrees in the San Francisco Bay Area; TREExOFFICEs in London and Berlin; Amphibious Architecture in East River, NYC, and Derwent River Tasmania; and Urban Space Station (USS) at Emscherkunst in Dortmund.
Jeremijenko is founding Director of the Environmental Health Clinic (xCLINIC) International and Design Engineering at the Museum of Natural Futures (MoNF); both initiatives to develop shared infrastructures that improve human and environmental health. She has held faculty appointments and artist residencies at Yale University, New York University, Dartmouth College, and the Royal College of Art in London, University of California San Diego, Michigan State University.
Awards and honors include the VIDA Art and Artificial Life International Awards Pioneer Prize; the Advance Commercial Creatives Award (2019); the Most Innovative People (2013); most influential women in technology (2011); one of the inaugural top young innovators by MIT Technology Review and included in the 40 most influential designers internationally by ID Magazine. She is represented by Postmasters Gallery in NY.