Anastasiia Isaeva on building a floral practice from her apartment in Cologne

My creative life has always moved between disciplines — drawing, making, cooking, photography — but nature has been the constant. The garden of our summer house was probably my first studio. Today, alongside my full-time work in IT, I am building a practice around flowers, botanical and food materials, exploring how ordinary things can become something unexpected when we really look at them.

I had always been drawn to flowers, but the decision to take them seriously came on International Women’s Day, after a conference where women spoke about passion and business with equal conviction. My first arrangement was rather cumbersome — I barely knew what to do with chicken wire — but I remember the impulse very clearly: I wanted to make something of my own. I haven’t stopped since.

Right now I am drawn to two opposite scales: large spatial works that carry the feeling of wild nature, and small, precise objects made from unusual or overlooked materials. Conceptually, I am interested in translating the essence of a brand or an event into form — not illustrating it literally, but shifting it just enough to make people look twice.

Sometimes a work begins as an image — something that arrives during meditation, through a memory, or as a sudden picture in my head. At other times, the material speaks first: a bush by the river, dry grass, a strange vegetable. Then even a walk stops being just a walk. Everything becomes research.

I am especially drawn to seasonal and found materials — things you would probably never select in a flower shop. This summer, the heat in Germany dried the grasses along the river, and I became fascinated by their fragility, movement and freedom.

I also love working with fruit and vegetables because their geometry can be so stubborn. How do you make a round beetroot create a diagonal ascent? A rocket launch, made of roots.

Almost everywhere: architecture, object design, painting, food, landscapes, music, light. It can be a classical masterpiece, or something almost insignificant — the warmth of stone after a day in the sun, the rhythm of a façade, a texture suddenly noticed under my fingertips. Inspiration begins when something familiar becomes visible again.

Flowers have taught me to be both a guest and a conductor. They do not need me in order to be beautiful — they are already complete. My task is to listen first, and then create the conditions for different materials to enter a dialogue: perhaps a cultivated allium beside a tiny wild one from the riverbank. To orchestrate a kind of music that did not exist before.

Stay experimental without losing respect for the material. Do not accept its most obvious use too quickly — change its scale, direction, context or balance; ask what happens when a familiar material is made to behave differently.

Curiosity is a technique.