Flowers and fruit are symbols of beauty, youth, and pleasure. Simultaneously, in their decay, they become reminders of life’s brevity and the inevitability of death. The expressive power of withering was commonly used to represent the idea of vanitas in art, particularly in Flemish painting.

VANITAS is a series of rubber vases which reinterprets this concept for the context of the modern. Trying to capture the beauty of each stage of life, Birgit created vases inspired by the form and colors of withering flowers.

The project combines the newest production techniques with handcraft. A novel type of materiality was developed through combining 3D printing with rubber rotation casting, resulting in a rough, matte surface overlaid with a sparkling pattern of jewel-like points. The series contains full and unique hand finished vases in different stages of ‚withering‘.

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