Elena Pereira

Department: Contextual Design
Website: www.elenapereira.com

In Bloom

Research of the imaginative characteristics of flowers and their usual imagery in interior design.

Flowers are used to express emotion, and to express the cultivation of perfection. A flower is the signifer of all important
moments in life, of birth, love and death;
they are the objects through which we
express ourselves.
We copy flower and plant images onto the
objects we use and with which we surround
ourselves in millions of ways, to project
beauty into our environment. We exploit
the noble reputation of ‘nature’ in order to
guarantee aesthetic quality.
We are all born in a designed world, and
we implement nature in design.

Life withers. Nothing ever stays the
same. I’m frustrated with the cultivation of
perfection; I want to destroy it before it’s
gone in order to save a trace, capturing the
imprint of life as a way of preserving it.
Withering flowers have been used in still
lives as representations of human withering.
The temporality of the blooms leaves an
imprint, stains, irrational traces, separating
the pure from the impure. Nature stains
human culture with its embellishments.
Using the flower as the subject changes
an object. The motifs of patterns come and
go depending on the seasons, but rather
than being influenced by the flowers, they
are determined by our taste. Flowers are
ornaments in heat.

I find that an imprint and a cast from the
shape is the best ways to keep the flower’s
impression, as a residue of life.
The research of this project involved the
use of flowers and man-made materials
of existing flower prints, combining them to
reflect the true essence of flowers.
By extracting the juice, colour, matter and
shape from the real flowers.
The stronger the constructions of the
technique were, like hammering or stitching,
the stronger the flower showed its essence.
The desire for capturing and preserving life
by extracting life into our wallpapers, fabrics, flower holders and into our beds.