Origins of Flora

I clearly remember the first time I thought of plants as a substance, a raw material. Investigating the topic of natural ornamentation led me to one of London’s flower markets, where I realised the economics behind it, and the enormous amounts of waste it produces. There’s a common rule that what hasn’t sold in the first two days at the market, has to be tossed. So, I took the waste with me and started experimenting with it, bringing it back to life.

My early encounters with plants were therefore not in pristine gardens, but in the bins of London’s flower markets, where I would collect their waste—wilted, fragrant, already in decline—and drag heavy garbage bags across the Underground to the eighth floor of the RCA in Kensington. The smell was unforgiving. The crushed bodies of flowers wept into themselves. But once emptied, those bags gave way to a landscape unlike any other. The studio became a terrain of decay: petals, leaves, stems in every stage of surrender.

These botanical fragments became my pigments. I would mix them with natural binders, press them onto a canvas with a traditional mangle, and dream of eternalising their fragile lives.

Before coming to London, I experimented with various types of resins and composites at the Design Academy Eindhoven. From the very beginning, I was interested in exploring the tension between preservation and the inherent ephemerality of the natural material.

My initial experiments with submerging flowers in resin led me to create a material that was to evolve and change over time, allowing me to  observe the slow decomposition of the botanical tissue.  By injecting a set of bacteria that were able to survive without oxygen and at very high temperatures, the flowers infused in the resin were supposed to be consumed from within, decomposing and disappearing over time.

Over years or decades, the bacterium would feed off the flowers. Enveloped in a translucent material, the plants, consumed from within, were to disappear slowly, leaving a sheer memory of their shape.


With further development, the premise of burying a once-living matter in a solidifying composite provided a solution to preserve its beauty and make it last for centuries to come. Sealed resin provided us with the required stability and durability of the final material. An incident with tinting the resin with a black pigment altered its visual character. Waste flowers, selected for their sculptural shapes and vivid colours preserved using an array of drying and processing techniques, were submerged under the surface of resin, evoking Flemish still lifes or impressions of natural phenomena. This is how Flora came to be — a lasting contemplation on ephemerality, preservation, and decay.