Swapping Lip Gloss for Flower Petals, 
Meet Body-Artist Maria Alekseevna

Words by Chloe Taylor
Photography by Maria Alekseevna

“I just see the beauty in nature. I am drawn to flowers, twigs and insects. It’s like an adventure. As a child, I spent the whole summer, outside the city, in nature” says 23-year-old artist Maria Alekseevna, “and now I have rediscovered the beauty of nature, and I feel the need to show it in new and unusual angles”. 

The Moscow based artist began posting her “body-art” onto Instagram in February 2020 for her, now 12.7K, followers. Although she has been posting other photography onto the app for the past 6 years. creates unique images, inspired by and using materials from nature, like petals, fleshy fruits and slugs. Using eyelash glue, she sticks these objects onto her face, hands and nails. With fleshy fruits and dainty flowers, she sits them on her teeth and around her eye; bell pepper stems get screwed into walls, wildflowers wedged around sandals and dandelions in the place of thongs.

“I am not the first in this art” Maria says speaking about her creative inspirations, including other female artists like, Tamara Obukhova (@touchecocnomy), who creates interesting looks using everyday, non-traditional items like matches, flowers and even mouldy bread; 

Anastasia Pilepchuk (@nastia_pilepchuk), a Russian artist, based in Berlin, who makes her own decorative masks, facial pieces and jewellery out of beads, embroidery and recycled plastic; and Zhong Lin (@zhonglin_), a Malaysian-Chinese photographer who takes a range of different photos, playing around makeup, models and different mediums. 

However, with the idea in mind, Maria looked to her long-time love… nature. Spring was blooming and the new “flowering of nature”, last year in 2020, gave her the creative boost she needed to finally start crafting herself. In the warm summers, Maria finds her art supplies in the forest, or failing that, her garden. In the cold, snowy Russian winters, she relies on her local flower shop to provide new materials for her artworks. She says that she “integrates plants into everyday life” but just in unusual ways. This is the primary aim for most of her content. 2020 was a tough year for all of us, with the coronavirus pandemic affecting everyone around the world. With her newfound free time in lockdown, she began to create and post her artworks. 

She said: “my creativity can be seen as a positive by-product of the pandemic, and I am not alone with that. Sometimes I find young artists and find their first works to see when they started, and this date is often also at the beginning of the quarantine”. Maria says that she hopes that when people look at her work, they “conclude that bad times can give birth to something good”. 

As well as creating her body art, Maria is also a final year transport design student at Moscow Polytechnic University. It was not something she planned on doing and almost fell into it by accident. She studied art at school and discovered that she was in fact a multi-talented artist who could also draw exceptionally well. “I applied to be a designer but after college I still didn’t know who I wanted to be” she said. She then stumbled upon the course online: “I liked it and I enrolled!”. However, over the years she spent studying, she discovered that perhaps automotive design may not be for her long term: “In the process of learning, I understand that this is not mine”. Looking at her Instagram, it comes as no surprise that after graduation, she says that she wants to focus even more on her body artworks and begin to take commissions for shoots. She also mentioned that she wants to have her “own exhibition and start making durable works of art”.  

For Maria creating is a “development of myself as a person. This is the core that holds me. It is the best part of me”. She believes that art helps to create culture and thus “a higher standard of living”. She even likened the importance of it to “a human need [that]…needs to be met!”. Believe it or not, Maria’s worst struggle, when it comes to her art, is working with mushrooms: “they don’t stick!” she says. Her favourite piece that she has created is a gorgeous collection of images from the end of August 2020 (see the last 3 images). The images show Maria standing in a lush grassy field, with leaves weaved into her braided blonde hair and a crown made out of twigs and dried leaves, sat on top of her head like a halo. In one image, she stands barefoot in a stream with a tall branch in her hand, like a cane. In another, a tiny snake slithers down her forehead, in between her eyes. In a third, she poses with tiny yellow flowers sat over her closed eyes and pinned on each side of her head. They look almost biblical. Maria loves them because “they were created in nature! The weather was wonderful and being in nature, especially doing some kind of activity in nature, was wonderful. This work feels like something bigger than what I do at home. For this shoot, I dressed up, made an agreement with a photographer stylist and spend several hours in the forest. Tearing the grass and weaving it in your hair is a separate kind of emotion!”.

Her best piece of advice to any aspiring artist is to “be attentive in your own creativity. Be inspired but be careful not to crush your own personality. Do whatever you want and you will have everything”.

Check out Maria’s work at @supinatra on Instagram.