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Frozen Flowers Are Your Next Great Rainy-Day Project

For project '0˚C,' flowers, bones, and a head of lettuce get sealed in blocks of ice.
Dancing In the Dark. Photos by Bruce Boyd

Colorful flowers, whose own simply beauty is ageless, are frozen into blocks of ice and then dropped into ponds for a series of photographs which at once celebrate and mock the clichés of flower photography. These prototypical images of natural beauty are made alluring and unfamiliar when faced with frost.

Bruce Boyd, the photographer, and Tharien Smith, the designer and arranger, note the complicated relationship between flowers and ice on the website for their project, 0˚C. It's a series both startlingly beautiful and slightly melancholy: In one piece, small bones are encased alongside what look like bulrushes.

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Violently Happy

Flowers have always been one of the most important visual motifs in art, but they’re also one of the most cliché images in photography. Boyd and Smith complicate cliché flower photographs in 0˚C, resulting in a playful but also melancholy series. An image of sunflowers covered in ice is poignant—their vivacity is almost palpable—but in another photograph, white flowers seem to be a part of the ice, rather than being destroyed by it. See more of the series below, and for more frozen flowers, check out the works of Azuma Makoto and grade.die.

Fields of Gold

Take This Waltz

Sweet Dreams

Bone Machine

Click here to check out 0˚C.

Related:

From Van Gogh to Jeff Koons, Here’s a History of Flowers in Art

Flowers Bloom And Wither In New Interactive Installation

A Kinetic Sea of Flowers Blooms in Tokyo