Alternately beautiful and disgusting but nearly always fascinating, works of art that use nature in place of more traditional media raise questions about the power and responsibility of human dominance over our natural surroundings and the other species living on Earth. These living, breathing works of art might be innocently pretty, like modified flower petals or arrangements of colorful mushrooms, or they might feel a little more sinister, making controversial use of living mice, insects or bacteria swabbed from human orifices.

What’s your take on the use of living things as art? Do you believe the message justifies its potential death, even if it’s a bonsai tree or an ant?

Philodendron Xanad by Ruben Bellinkx

The lush green leaves of a living philodendron plant seem to have pierced right through a wall in a confounding installation by Belgium-based artist Ruben Bellinkx. The leaves, as you can see, are much too large and seemingly undamaged to have been forced through small holes in the walls – so how’d he do it? Quite simply, the artist rebuilt that section of the wall from scratch, cutting careful slits following the contours of the leaves with a jigsaw.

Jeweled Larval Cocoons by Hubert Duprat

When placed in an aquarium with nothing but gold, turquoise and pearls to make their cocoons from, caddisfly larvae will build themselves jeweled enclosures that end up looking like tiny sculptural treasures when they’re done. Artist Hubert Duprat ‘collaborated’ with the Trichopteres larva to produce the final results, which are held together with silk excreted from their salivary glands. The larvae spend a few weeks inside these jeweled cocoons before emerging as mature flies.

The Life and Death of Botanicals: 6 Works by Azuma Makoto

Artist Azuma Makoto is known for incorporating live and cut flowers, vines, bonsai trees and even full-scale palm trees into his botanical works of art, often contrasting themes of vitality and decay. For an exhibit entitled ‘Drop Time’ at the Mass Gallery in Tokyo, Makoto created beautiful bouquets and placed them inside acrylic boxes so their slow decay could be observed through all its stages. Another floral exhibit, ‘Iced Flowers,’ temporarily preserved bouquets inside blocks of ice.

For ‘Sephirothic Flower,’ Makoto took lush floral arrangements deep beneath the surface of the sea and photographed them in the dark waters, capturing their interactions with sea creatures like eels.

Makoto has even launched plants into space. ‘EXOBIOTANICA 2’ saw bouquets lifted beyond the Earth’s atmosphere using weather balloons, and the original EXOBIOTANICA did the same with a Japanese white pine bonsai inside a carbon fiber frame.

Somehow, the artist’s installation of a living bonsai inside an abandoned power plant feels just as momentous as those outer space shots, embodying a hopeful message about life springing eternal.

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The figures seem to float on air, hanging in unnatural positions, their limbs dangling. Made of a compacted growing medium, these sculptures by Mathilde Roussel are planted with grass seeds and allowed to transform over time, the grass sprouting and growing.

The French artist’s ‘Lifes of Grass’ series is pictured here at the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in Nashville, Tennessee. The sculptures are formed using a metal frame, soil and wheat grass.

The artist explains that she aims to show viewers, through the sculptures, that the food we eat and the way that it is grown and transported has an impact on us all. “The natural world, ingested as food becomes a component of human being. Through these anthropomorphic and organic sculptures made of soil and wheat grass seeds, I strive to show that food, its origin, its transport, has an impact on us beyond its taste.”

“The power inside it affects every organ of our body. Observing nature and being aware of what and how we eat makes us more sensitive to food cycles in the world – of abundance, of famine – and allows us to be physically, intellectually and spiritually connected to a global reality.”

Imagine a world in the not-so-distant future – a world so ravaged by war that the human race has become desperate to turn things around. In the midst of this desperation, the Pentagon’s “weird science” branch DARPA comes up with a brilliant way to end all war. They will militarize insects, giving them the gifts of intelligence, incredible power and unprecedented access. They would use these tiny living weapons to bring down the great military powers of the world. But what they never considered was that, with their newly-granted intelligence, these tiny weapons would decide the real enemy was the human race itself….

The story, of course, is pure fiction. It was constructed to explain the purpose of these incredible armored insects. Made by Dean Christ of Ubyka Studios, the Ubyka Army is a collection of museum-quality dried bugs adorned with various bits and pieces of weaponry, armor and tactical gear.

The Ubyka Army is divided into two segments: Skyforce and Earthforce. Skyforce bugs, adorned with rotors or shiny silver wings, glide above the enemy to deliver their deathly payload of weapons from the sky. Earthforce insects can swiftly approach ground-based enemies and let loose their own brand of powerful weaponry.

Whether you find the concept of militarized insects ingenious or insane, Dean Christ’s work is aesthetically amazing. He uses model parts and enamel paint from collectors’ kits to embellish the already-impressive insects. Their natural attack and defense mechanisms are only enhanced by the artist’s additions.

From run-of-the-mill beetles to terrifying bird-eating tarantulas, the specimens Christ uses in his biological sculptures are nothing short of works of art on their own. The artist has said that he does not aim to shock for the sake of shocking; rather, he invites viewers to look past the initial shock factor that comes with using real animals in art and to see the underlying message.

According to Christ, that message is a cautionary one. With the governments of developed nations spending so much on weapons research – much of it of an unconventional strain – it’s only a matter of time before they try something as wild as turning bugs into trained cyborgs. Already, real-life experiments have allowed scientists to control cockroaches’ movements through brain implants.

Additionally, Christ points out that plugging into the brains of insects would be far easier than building robots and programming them to move like insects. Though he is not suggesting that this course of action would be wise, his sculptures underline what could very well come to be in the future of military technology.