Entropy at the end. Marcin Rusak is convinced of this, and he loves to experiment with the eternal contradiction between beauty and transience. On an estate not far from the Polish capital, to preserve the ephemeral, he transforms leaves into furniture and flowers into contemporary fossils. But above all, he acknowledges that everything ages.
Nature, for Marcin Rusak, is an unstable archive: it is not preserved, but observed as it evolves and disappears. A Polish designer born in 1987 to a family of floristry and trained in design in Warsaw, Eindhoven, and London, he considers the plant world a complex system of memory, economics, desire, and industry.
“I think much of my work stems from an attempt to negotiate a contradiction: humans desperately want to preserve things that, by their very nature, are temporary. Flowers are the perfect example. In the studio, we push this tension further, creating contemporary fossils. But I'm equally interested in allowing things to evolve, transform, and even disappear: like the vases in the Perishable series (made from organic materials combined with natural binders like flour or sugar, ed.) or the biodegradable plastic sculptures Ghost Orchid, which, when treated with special enzymes and microorganisms, can slowly dissolve into the soil and even nourish it.”
