plants

This project grew out of my need to spend time with plants and to understand them through touch and transformation. Over the last summers, the practice became a way of learning nature’s forms and behaviors, how different flowers dry, how long they last, and how this changes their afterlife. I dip plants into paint as a way of preserving them, almost like mummifying them, creating a skin that keeps their shape while the living body slowly dries underneath. In this way, I take the plant out of its natural cycle at its peak, freezing it in a moment of beauty. It feels similar to how humans try to control life and death, wanting things to stay forever, refusing decay. When we pick flowers and place them in vases, we already remove them from their ecosystem and interrupt their ability to reproduce, only to admire them.

The project carries a critical perspective on this desire to dominate and preserve nature, not as a judgment but as a reflection on our own destructive tenderness. In one workshop, participants created blood-red flower crowns to wear at a festival, confronting this ambivalent act of beautifying something while also ending its life. They worked with plants they barely knew the names of, transforming them into objects of celebration and display. For me, the work is about this contradiction in human nature, our wish to care for nature and our constant interference with its processes. It is not about right or wrong, but about seeing ourselves clearly inside these gestures.