For his installation, Iced Flowers, botanical artist Makota Azuma encapsulated flowers within large blocks of ice, as if they were frozen in time. When the ice melted, the preserved flowers in a way bloomed again, a nod to nature’s life cycle.

Of these pieces, Azuma says,”Flowers will show unique expressions that they do not display in everyday life, by placed under such a different environment.”

Azuma creates living artworks using flowers and plants which he arranges in unusual settings, often a commentary on the life and death of the plant–something he says is not considered in traditional flower arranging.

Iced Flowers is typical of Azuma’s method of placing botanical sculptures in inorganic spaces not found in nature. For his Art of Plants, Azuma merged art and fashion in a massive living art installation where thousands of plants climbed the interior walls of Japanese department store Isetan Shinjuku.

Azuma has in the past stuffed flower petals like sardines inside bottles and more than once suspended plants in mid-air. He’s turned botanical oeuvres into performance art, stomping on hundreds of flowers during a musical performance and launching a tree into space–thereby adding spacetime to transform his three-dimensional piece into a four-dimensional piece. It’s like sending flowers to Einstein.

H/T Spoon & Tango. Images via Spoon & Tango and the artist.