A Herbarium You Can Walk Around: Marcin Rusak’s Vas Florum

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 8 min

A herbarium exists to make a dead plant permanently consultable. Press it, mount it, number it, give it a Latin name and a date, and a botanist can return to it three centuries later. Marcin Rusak has kept every part of that apparatus except the flatness, and the result is a specimen you can walk around.

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Vas Florum: Resina Botanica ran at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Ladbroke Hall in west London from 22 May to 30 August 2025. It was the third showing under that title in three years and in three cities, after Paris in 2023 and New York in 2024, and it is the point where a body of work that began as vessels became a room.

The exhibition contained two kinds of object. There were the vessels themselves, sculptural forms in resin with real flowers suspended inside them and patinated bronze around them. And there were low tables whose tops take their outlines from boulders in a Polish river, resin cast to shapes nobody drew.

What holds the two together is not a theme. It is a filing system.

What a herbarium is actually for

A herbarium is one of the more quietly radical inventions in the history of looking at things.

A plant collected in the field is useless as evidence within days. Pressed flat, dried, mounted on a sheet, labelled with its species, the place and date of collection and the name of the collector, and then given an accession number and a place in a cabinet, it becomes something else: a fixed point that any later researcher can go back to and check. Kew holds around seven million such sheets. Some of them are four hundred years old and still readable.

The format is defined by four things. The specimen is preserved rather than represented. It is individually numbered. It is named in Latin. And it is stored so that it can be found again.

Rusak’s vessels satisfy all four, which is unusual for objects sold through a design gallery.

They contain the actual plants, not images of them. Each carries a number. Each carries a Latin title. And they are catalogued individually rather than issued as an edition, which means the pieces behave like accessions rather than like products.

The one convention he has discarded is the one that makes a herbarium sheet possible in the first place. A pressed specimen is flat because a cabinet drawer is flat, and flatness costs you the plant’s volume, its arrangement in space and any sense of how it sat before it was collected. Rusak casts in resin instead, so the flower stays three-dimensional and the viewer walks around it. It is a herbarium that has given up filing efficiency in exchange for the one thing pressing destroys.

The vessels, and the way they are labelled

The titles are the tell.

The pieces are numbered and named in the manner of specimens: Vas Florum: 07, Incubatorium Botanicum. Vas Florum: 17, Aere Involutum. Vas Florum: 21, Hortus Exoticus. Vas florum is Latin for a vessel of flowers, and the subtitles carry on in the same register, one meaning a botanical incubator, another describing something wrapped in air, another an exotic garden.

Then, among them, Vas Florum: 11, Avia Stachowicz. Avia is Latin for grandmother.

That single title changes how the rest of the group reads. A numbering system that runs from botanical Latin into a family name is not a scientific catalogue borrowing poetry. It is a personal archive borrowing the authority of a scientific catalogue, and doing it openly. Rusak’s practice has always come out of a Polish family whose business was growing flowers, and the naming convention is where that history is stated most plainly, in one word, without a paragraph of explanation attached.

The vessels themselves are dense. Roses, orchids, carnations, tulips, asters, daisies and hydrangeas are packed into the resin at a concentration closer to a seventeenth-century flower painting than to a pressed sheet, layered so that blooms behind show through blooms in front and the whole mass reads as a single painterly volume rather than as individual stems. The colours are the colours the plants went in with, shifted by the resin and by time: green, ochre, rust.

Around them sits patinated bronze, which does the opposite job to the resin. Where the resin is glassy, even and sealed, the bronze is matte, worked and open to the air. Setting the two together makes the resin look more sealed than it would on its own, which is precisely the quality the work is about.

The tables are the riverbed

The other half of the exhibition is furniture, and it moves the subject from the plant to the ground it grew on.

The coffee tables take their outlines from boulders in the Solinka, a river running through the Bieszczady Mountains in the far south-east of Poland, one of the least populated corners of the country. The tops are irregular, lobed and asymmetric, cast to shapes derived from stones worn by water rather than drawn on a screen, and they project out past their bronze bases so the edge reads as a section through something rather than as a rim.

That decision is worth noticing. A designer working with resin and flowers has every reason to reach for a soft, botanical outline: a petal, a leaf, a pond. Rusak reached for geology instead, and for a specific stretch of a specific river.

It gives the show a second timescale. The flowers in the vessels were alive weeks before they were cast. The boulders those tabletops derive from took a few thousand years to reach that shape. Putting both in one room, made from the same material, is the most economical way of saying what the work has always been about, which is the difference between the rate at which a plant changes and the rate at which anything else does.

Where the flowers come from

The material supply is not incidental to the work, and Rusak is unusually straightforward about it.

Most of the plant matter is stock that never sold: flowers taken as waste from growers and sellers he has working relationships with, at the point where they cease to have commercial value and before they are thrown out. That is the same seam his practice has drawn on since he began.

But he does not work only from waste. For particular projects he collects specifically, studying the local, vernacular flora that represents a given ecosystem, which is a botanist’s approach rather than a florist’s and produces a different kind of object: one that is about a place rather than about a supply chain.

Rusak has described the shift in his own interest plainly. With time, he has said, he has found himself drawn to the untamed wilderness of nature, and he tries to capture that impression in the new work.

You can see exactly that in the room. The vessels are cultivated species, the products of an industry: roses, carnations, hydrangeas, the contents of any florist’s bucket. The tables are a river nobody manages. The exhibition runs from the most farmed version of a plant to the least farmed version of a landscape, in one material.

Three cities, three years, one title

Vas Florum: Resina Botanica has now been shown three times: Paris in 2023, New York in May 2024, and London in 2025.

It would be easy to call that a touring exhibition, and it is not one. A tour moves a fixed set of objects between venues. Each Vas Florum has carried the resin research further than the last, so the title functions as a running heading for an ongoing body of work rather than as the name of a show that travels. The London edition introduced the Solinka tables and a new group of vessels; the New York edition had shown a different group, including the numbered pieces named above.

That is a rarer format than it sounds, and it suits the subject. A herbarium is not finished either. It is added to, accession by accession, and its value comes from accumulation rather than from any single sheet. Three cities in three years under one title is the exhibition equivalent of the same habit.

Whether a fourth follows is the interesting question, and the answer will presumably arrive as a number nobody has used yet.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easy way to describe this work is preservation, and it is the description Rusak himself has gently declined for years. Resin does not stop a flower. It slows it down and makes the slowing visible, and pieces in collections continue to shift colour long after they leave the studio.

The herbarium is the better frame, because a herbarium was never about stopping decay either. It was about making something findable: numbered, named, dated, and available to anyone who comes looking later.

What Rusak has added is the third dimension and, in one title, a grandmother. A cabinet at Kew can tell you what a plant was. These can tell you whose it was.