Maker’s Spotlight – Marcin Rusak

As the son and grandson and great-grandson of flower growers, it is no surprise that Marcin Rusak has long been fascinated by flowers. He views them as natural sources of inspiration and decoration and uses flowers in various forms to tell his personal stories. Rusak’s visual creations explore “overlooked details of our lives which are recreated and re-imagined.”

The Polish-born, London-based designer’s studio receives weekly floral deliveries that they process and dry prior to starting their involved processes. Specifically for the Flora Collection, Rusak created a stunning collection of furniture and lighting that features flowers encased in resin. Once the flowers are “jailed”, Rusak cuts the blocks to reveal the petals inside.

The Flora Collection came about after two years of researching two of the artist’s primary interests: nature and materials. Rusak began by exploring how he could use flowers to help create durable and valuable products. The petals are set in black resin in order to freeze the forms and prevent them from drying out and warping. Rusak’s research taught him several different processes that were applied to produce a variety of effects. For example by cutting sheets and 3-D forms from the resin, the flowers’ uniquely beautiful cross sections are revealed.

“Frozen in time” perhaps best describes the final product. The petals look as though they’re caught mid-motion… as though at any moment, they might break through their enclosures. Rusak’s art further seeks to feature distinct micro-environments; in the Flora Collection, bacteria is introduced during production and causes some inserted flowers to mutate. Over time, the flowers shrink and eventually vanish only to be replaced by “negative space.” With the Perma Collection, as the resin planes are manipulated, a flower might get “caught in the crossfire;” in other words, it might get sliced to reveal its insides. Once exposed at the surface, these samples dry up and eventually disappear leaving behind minuscule craters.

For his new collection, titled the Flower Infused Glass Series, Rusak takes creativity to another realm. He inserts flowers into a “sort of vase” and traps them between two sheets of glass that have just emerged from the kiln. The temperature causes the flowers to essentially disintegrate, to burn away leaving only an ash residue. This leftover material reveals the pattern where the plants were previously placed, keeping the original shape of the flowers. Clearly this was difficult to master as this had never been done before… an experiment translated into a beautiful outcome!

Perhaps Rusak says it best (as told to Anna Carnick in an interview Design Miami last year), “I think of these natural materials as media to talk about the importance of nature in our lives, but also the meaningless consumption that follows trends and irresponsible habits of replacing over maintaining. [I’m] creating a language, a certain aesthetic of decay, as a valuable aspect for the works to exist in the first place. Visualizing that decay, we can behold a certain type of beauty connected to transformation and make a break with the notion that what decays needs to be thrown away. In that sense, the aesthetic becomes a function.”