Marcin Rusak Turns Discarded Flowers into Time-Defying Collectible Design

Polish designer Marcin Rusak, born in Warsaw in 1987, builds furniture, surfaces and installations from unsold flowers, dried leaves and faded petals, giving plant matter a structural rather than decorative role. He grew up in a family tied to flower cultivation and completed a master's in Design Products at the Royal College of Art in London. His Flowering Transition project, begun in 2014 after research in London flower markets, gathered discarded blooms and expanded into objects, textiles, fragrances and experimental materials, documented in a 2014 publication of the same name. The Flora series embeds selected flowers in resin, producing deep-toned surfaces where petals and stems read like fossils or mineral veins. Perma extends the technique to furnishings and sculptural forms, with each composition varying in color and fragment placement. Protoplasting Nature wraps dried leaves around metal frameworks, yielding surfaces that shift over years. Rusak treats patina and discoloration as part of an object's material history rather than flaws, questioning how value is assigned to what is kept and what is thrown away.