Floral: Plastic

This series examines plastic flowers as objects suspended between imitation and permanence—artificial forms that carry the emotional weight of something once alive. Rendered in close detail, their surfaces are flawless: petals that do not bruise, colors that do not fade, and structures that resist time. They offer a version of beauty untouched by decay, yet inseparable from the idea of what they are meant to replace.

In photographing them, I am less interested in illusion than in tension—the space between what is real and what is preserved. These flowers do not wilt, and because of that, they quietly expose the fragility of everything that does. Their permanence is not natural; it is imposed. And in that imposition, they begin to reflect something deeply human: the urge to hold on, to stabilize what is inherently unstable, to keep beauty from slipping away.

Light becomes a collaborator in this work, revealing both the seduction and the artifice. The images invite a second look—what appears delicate is, in fact, unyielding. What feels alive is not. This contradiction is central. The work does not attempt to disguise the synthetic nature of its subject but instead leans into it, allowing the artificial to speak as its own kind of truth.

These photographs are about memory as much as material. Plastic flowers function as stand-ins for moments we try to preserve—gestures of care, symbols of grief, tokens of celebration. They do not change, but our relationship to them does. Over time, they accumulate meaning, not through growth or decay, but through presence.

This series is an exploration of permanence as both comfort and illusion. It asks what it means to preserve something that was never alive, and why that still feels like holding onto something real.