Watch the process behind artist Martin Bergström's hauntingly beautiful work in this exclusive video

For artist and designer Martin Bergström, the fascination with flowers started at an early age. “I was three when I learned the Nordic flora by heart,” he tells me. “Then, for my fourth birthday, I asked to have a huge big volume on Nordic flowers, and I studied everything.”

Nature for him was never far. He grew up on an island in the Swedish archipelago and admits that, when he looks back, his childhood mightn’t have been “that normal”. “There was a lot going on,” he explains with a laugh. His dad was an inventor, there was a bomb shelter in the backyard and a “jungle” was created under their house. But it was in this environment that Bergström was able to flourish and hone his interests. “I think that the flowers sort of inspired me to start drawing. And I had this really strong sense of colours from a really young age.”

He started painting seriously at seven with parents who happily let him paint on any surface he could find before having his first art exhibition at 14. “I actually sold a lot, nearly all of it,” he tells me. “It was something that really pushed me. Made me believe in what I was doing.”

Of this first collection, he says; “It was clearly very inspired by surrealism and very much inspired by Frida Kahlo. There were lots of eyes with tears and lots of flowers.”

He goes to find one of the original pieces that he still has to show me. It’s a blue shell morphing into a flower. It’s very impressive. “It’s not that different from what I do now, but the techniques… well, I was 14.” he trails off.

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During these formative years, Bergström also had a keen interest in fashion - he knew how he wanted to style himself. “I grew up in the 1980s, and I hated 1980s fashion, and I just wanted to have suits and ties and white shirts.” So he was a seven-year-old playing and painting in his island home, studying flowers all the while kitted in a suit and tie.

As he grew, he realised that his art wasn’t limited to canvas - and began experimenting with textiles and fabrics. He then studied both in Sweden and abroad before launching his company, which takes on a wide range of creative projects from costume design for pop stars to wallpaper for homes, in 2001.

In Vogue Scandinavia’s February-March issue, Bergström was commissioned to create floral artworks made entirely from pressed flowers. It’s a medium Bergström started working with a couple of years ago. He now has a collection of herbarium flowers in the thousands, with the oldest being from 1860.

“They are kept on paper in a press. So I take them out with knives, and then I have tools that I use to pick them up,” he explains of the process. “Then I paint a background and glue the flowers onto the background. It’s very analogue. There is no retouching to push them around.”

From there, they are scanned in a particular way that they can be blown up and used as wallpaper or on garments. In the case of Vogue Scandinavia, it was actually the first time he made them smaller than their original size.

“It’s kind of haunted that something is so old and also preserved. The leaves from the trees are still green, and the flowers still have colour,” he says.

It's this preservation of life that attracts Bergström to flowers. His view on them is symbolic of existence, "there is a presence of death and life", and his reverence towards them is almost religious. "The world is spinning, but the flowers are always the same, even if they are like 120 or 100 years old. There is something very comforting in that," he explains. "One day we'll be gone, but hopefully, the flowers will always sprout in the spring."

So what is a flower lover's favourite bloom? Bergström says, "he loves the rarest ones or the most ordinary ones." But one that springs to mind is the stinking nightshade. "It's very poisonous, but it's so beautiful."

Bergström's latest work, which includes pieces he created for Vogue Scandinavia, is currently displayed at Storkyrkan Church in Stockholm. It will run until March 1, 2022. Bergström has also been invited to stage the large inspirational exhibition at Stockholm Furniture and Light Fair, which will be held in September 2022.