Marcin Rusak: Vas Florum – Resina Botanica at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Ladbroke Hall
This summer, London’s renowned Carpenters Workshop Gallery presents a poetic and sensorial journey into the world of flora, memory, and material transformation with the unveiling of Vas Florum: Resina Botanica, a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist and designer Marcin Rusak. On view at the gallery’s West London venue, Ladbroke Hall, from 22 May to 30 August 2025, the show delves into Rusak’s richly symbolic, nature-imbued design practice, where the ephemeral beauty of flowers is captured, preserved, and reinterpreted through resin, metal, and memory.
This new collection deepens Rusak’s exploration of organic matter, extending his signature use of real plant material into new sculptural and functional forms. Through coffee tables, sculptural vases, and botanical compositions, Vas Florum: Resina Botanica reflects a deeply personal engagement with nature and time, creating a design language that is both visceral and intellectual. It’s a show that speaks equally to lovers of contemporary art, collectable design, and biophilic storytelling.
Carpenters Workshop Gallery: A Platform for Material Innovation
For over two decades, Carpenters Workshop Gallery has been a global leader in the presentation of contemporary collectable design, curating exhibitions that challenge the traditional boundaries between art, craft, and function. With locations in London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, the gallery champions a generation of makers who experiment with form, materiality, and narrative.
Ladbroke Hall, its West London outpost, is not only an architectural landmark but also a dynamic creative campus. Here, design intersects with performance, fine art, and gastronomy—a fitting setting for Marcin Rusak’s botanical worlds to unfold. As part of the gallery’s 2025 summer programme, Vas Florum: Resina Botanica sits alongside exhibitions by Paul Cocksedge and Maarten Baas, marking a season of radical material exploration.
Marcin Rusak: Nature as Memory
Born into a family of flower growers in Poland, Marcin Rusak has long been fascinated by the aesthetic, biological, and emotional dimensions of plants. His work sits at the intersection of science, design, and storytelling, using natural elements as both subject and medium.
Rusak’s pieces often begin with real flowers, which are preserved in resin, embedded in metal, or used to create pigments. His approach to design reflects a contemporary alchemy, transforming the fleeting beauty of nature into permanent, yet living forms. Through this process, Rusak explores themes of decomposition, preservation, and the passage of time, bringing a lyrical sensibility to the world of functional art.
Resina Botanica Tables: Riverbeds and Resin
At the heart of the exhibition are new iterations of Rusak’s acclaimed Resina Botanica tables—coffee tables whose irregular shapes and translucent surfaces are directly inspired by natural forms and geological features. The latest editions draw from the Solinka River in the Bieszczady Mountains of Southern Poland, where boulders and stones resting beneath moving water serve as both aesthetic and metaphorical inspiration.
Each tabletop features complex floral compositions cast in resin—lush swirls of green, ochre, and earthy rust tones that evoke the movement of river currents and the layering of organic material beneath the surface. These compositions are framed by cast bronze bases, their patinated surfaces echoing the texture and temperature of stone.
The tactile tension between smooth, glassy resin and cool, weathered metal reflects Rusak’s interest in material dualities: permanence vs. decay, softness vs. solidity, life vs. entropy. In these tables, nature is preserved and abstracted, allowing flowers to transcend their usual fragility and become enduring symbols of place and memory.
Vas Florum Sculptural Vessels: A Botanical Archive
Alongside the tables, the exhibition debuts a series of new sculptural vases from Rusak’s Vas Florum series. These vessels are more than functional objects—they are botanical reliquaries, carefully embedding floral matter into sculptural resin forms.
Rusak draws attention to the diversity and complexity of flowering plant families, spotlighting species such as roses, orchids, carnations, asters, tulips, daisies, and hydrangeas. Their colours, shapes, and arrangements are dense and painterly, forming what can only be described as baroque floral mosaics—compositions that feel both scientific and romantic.
Preserved in resin and presented with the gravitas of archaeological finds, these vessels become a time capsule of the natural world, a reminder of both its fragility and enduring wonder. The works also serve as a quiet commentary on botanical cultivation and cultural symbolism, tracing the histories of these species across centuries of gardening, commerce, and human admiration.
Memory and Materiality: Rusak’s Alchemical Process
In a time dominated by digital aesthetics and mass production, Rusak’s practice is profoundly material-driven and tactile. Each piece is the result of slow, deliberate craftsmanship, blending organic material with technical expertise in casting, patination, and resin manipulation.
His studio operates like a botanical lab, where flowers are gathered, catalogued, dried, and transformed. These are not decorative embellishments, but integral to the object’s identity. Their presence is both visual and symbolic, evoking ideas of loss, memory, and transformation.
By extending the life of plants beyond their natural cycle, Rusak doesn’t seek to halt decay, but rather to reframe it. His work challenges the notion that beauty lies in perfection or permanence. Instead, he offers an alternative vision—where imperfection is sublime, and decay becomes a form of evolution.
Vas Florum: A Tribute to Nature’s Narrative Power
Vas Florum: Resina Botanica is more than an exhibition—it’s a meditation on how we perceive and engage with nature in a time of ecological and cultural transformation. Rusak’s pieces ask us to pause, look closer, and consider the stories held within each petal, stem, and vessel.
This is a body of work that transcends the decorative, offering a rare synthesis of design, science, and storytelling. Whether encountered as a functional table or a sculptural vase, each piece holds within it a world of botanical memory; a quiet archive of life’s cycles, captured and reimagined through the eyes of an artist.
Visit the Exhibition
Marcin Rusak: Vas Florum – Resina Botanica
22 May – 30 August 2025
Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Ladbroke Hall
79 Barlby Road, London W10 6AZ
