Flower Installations: How Thousands of Blooms Become Art

A flower installation is when flowers stop being a bouquet and become a space: a ceiling, a carpet, a sculpture. These works are short-lived but unforgettable. Here are some of the best-known projects and how such installations are made.

Flowers for your own home installation: spray roses and flower baskets.

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Famous projects

• Rebecca Louise Law. The English artist suspends thousands of flowers on copper wire, creating “clouds” above visitors’ heads. The flowers dry gradually, so the installation changes during the exhibition.
• Jeff Koons’s “Puppy”. The giant terrier outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is covered with tens of thousands of living plants on a frame with built-in irrigation, and the flowers are changed with the seasons.
• The Brussels flower carpet. Every two years the Grand-Place is covered for a few days with a pattern made of hundreds of thousands of begonias.
• Azuma Makoto. The Japanese artist is known for experiments with flowers: in his Exobiotanica project he sent a bouquet into the stratosphere on a balloon and photographed it against the Earth.

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How installations are made

Behind their lightness lies serious engineering. The base is a frame of wire mesh, wire or timber. Fresh flowers go into water tubes or floral foam, or stand in containers hidden inside the structure. For suspended works, artists often choose flowers that dry well: roses, hydrangeas, gypsophila and lavender.

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A mini installation at home

The idea is easy to scale down: hang a branch with bunches of dried flowers above a table, or make a flower arch from mesh and greenery for a party. For the story of one of the most unusual exhibitions, see Flower House Detroit, and for flowers without a vase, our home decor ideas.

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FAQ

How long does a fresh-flower installation last?

From a few hours to a few weeks, depending on whether the flowers have water and whether they are meant to dry.

What happens to the flowers afterwards?

They are often composted, given to visitors or left to dry and turned into a new work.

Author: Maria Svitlovir

Graduated from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Institute of Biology and Medicine (2001). BSc in Biology, MSc in Horticulture. Writes about plants, works at a garden centre selecting and repotting plants, and contributes to plant reference guides.

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