I'm Fia Metta, an artist based in Hamburg, Germany. For as long as I can remember, nature and the beauty of the floral world have been an inspiration for me. Although having a professional background in pharmacy and literature, I started pursuing the path of art twenty years ago, and I am now an artist, photographer, and filmmaker. Creating images for me means no AI, but handcrafted details; all set designs, props, and costumes in my photography are made by myself.
For my current photography series 'In Flower', I designed and made dresses with real flowers.
My 'In Flower' Photography Series
The series reflects on the aspect of the ephemeral in fashion and blossoming flowers with their transient beauty, which seemed ideal to mirror that thought of fugacity expressed in my photography.
Narcissus Dress
Inspired by the elegance of the 1960s fashion photography, this dress was made with over a thousand Narcissus flowers and for the upper part of the dress with fresh ivy leaves. Ivy, with its almost leather-like texture, can be easily formed and stays fresh for days without any water, which is always an important criterion when planning these flower dresses. And lastly, I added a few blue hyacinth blossoms as little pearl-like accentuations.
Black Dress With Peonies
Creating dresses with peony flowers always brings me so much joy with their beauty, their rich colors, their pictorial blossoms, and oversized petals. For these pictures, I wanted darker colors combined with red roses to match the black fabric of the dress, but still working with the contrast of a light veil and more fragile-looking Peruvian lilies.
Ballet Dress With Sunflowers
For these photos with ballet dancer Ida Stempelmann, I wanted to work with the contrast of the light movement of ballet and its implied impression of weightlessness and a dress made with heavy fabric and big, heavy flowers, drawing the dress to the ground. For that effect, I used mainly sunflowers, roses, and Chrysanthemum blossoms. The images aspire to the aesthetic of the black-and-white fashion photography of the 1950s.
Pastel-Colored Peony Dress
This dress was made entirely of flowers, mostly peonies combined with pastel-colored Delphinium blossoms. I used peonies that were almost on the verge of fading, with already crumpled petals, trying to find the aesthetic of the wide-open flowers of still-life paintings.
Hydrangea Dress
For this Hydrangea dress, I created two different set designs, the first one completely in white, where the vivid colors of the flowers could stand out, with handmade columns that I wrapped in white fabric.
For the other set design, I painted a blue sky as a background with clouds that mirror the round form of the Hydrangea umbels. For the upper part of the dress, I had to use small blossoms so that the form of the dress wouldn’t vanish in huge flowers. I worked with small Chrysanthemum blossoms since they stay fresh for hours. It took me a full day to complete that dress. I started early in the morning with the flowers that go longest without any water, and in the early evening, I took the photos.
Flower Hats
The aesthetic of Renaissance paintings inspired me to make these two flower hats. For an autumn-themed hat, I used a few Chrysanthemum blossoms, but mostly autumnal colored leaves and berries. The other one was created in the time between winter and spring, so I decided to use blue Muscari blossoms and blue hyacinths on blue satin, covered in snow.
Gypsophila Dress
The base for this dress was Eucalyptus leaves, whose pale green wouldn't stand out too much, given that the dominant color for this dress was white.
I created it with Eustoma flowers, white lilies, and mainly Gypsophila paniculata flowers, whose small blossoms surrounded the model like swirling snowflakes.
More 'In Flower'
If you liked these images, please join my website, where you can find more photos from the 'In Flower' series.
Photos courtesy of @fia_metta_art.
