In Bloom

Elena Pereira is a conceptual artist working primarily in the medium of flora. Her work expresses the performativity of the design process through what she calls ‘absurd material studies’, a commentary on the fantasy of creating something new.

Pereira deconstructed the ironic process of printing images of nature – particularly flowers – onto wallpaper and fabrics that would be used indoors. The Industrial Revolution made it possible to print any image onto enormous quantities of fabric; this essentially removed the ‘natural’, artisanal process of hand-printing florals. Pereira thus decided to use actual flowers as printing materials. She used disregarded and rejected flowers from markets and florists, pressing them into silks and cottons with a hammer and wooden blocks. She fixated the prints with ‘secret decoctions’, re-mystifying the process of printing florals and emphasizing the value of discarded blooms.