For as long as he can remember, Leverkusen, Germany-based artist Mevlana Lipp has been fascinated by nature in all its diversity. “The simultaneous complexity and simplicity of the relationships in the biological cosmos contain a magic that I can not escape,” he explains. “Nature has always been a real but also imaginary place of longing for me, that has something paradisiacal about it. Not in the sense of a perfect perfect world, but in the essence clear and true in all facets.”

His work explores the most elementary details of existence—eating and being eaten, contact and sexuality, different stages of consciousness, action and reaction. He weaves these themes together into a kind of fictional creation story, in which fantastic plants master the steps to consciously acting beings, serving as “signifiers of human emotions and feelings.”

See more from Mevlana Lipp below!