About

Irina Divra is a Finland-based visual artist working under the artist name KLEVER. Her practice focuses on botanical relief, material imprint, time and place.

About the artist

I work with plants, material and botanical imprints, transforming fleeting natural forms into permanent reliefs.

My practice explores the relationship between nature, time, memory and place through direct contact with living plant material.

I am Irina Divra, a Finland-based visual artist working under the artist name KLEVER. Since 2018, I have been developing my practice through botanical relief, using flowers, leaves, stems, branches and other plant forms as physical elements in the making of each work.

Rather than depicting plants, I work with their direct imprints. Their structures become part of compositions shaped through repetition, rhythm, scale and empty space. Over time, my practice has evolved from smaller botanical studies towards larger, layered and increasingly complex relief works.

The Finnish landscape and its changing vegetation have become an important part of my practice. Forest plants, meadow species, ferns, grasses, flowers and other locally encountered forms carry the particular structures and rhythms of the environments in which they grow. Working with them allows me to approach place not as a landscape to be depicted, but through the physical presence of the plants that belong to it.

I am particularly interested in what remains when the living material itself is gone — how a temporary encounter between plant and material can become a lasting record of a particular moment and place. In this sense, each botanical imprint can also become a material memory of a specific environment and season.

From plant to relief

The plant disappears from the process. Its physical imprint remains.

Each relief begins with fresh plant material selected for its structure, scale and character. Flowers, leaves, stems and other botanical forms are arranged and pressed directly into clay, where even delicate details leave their physical imprints.

The plants are then removed and the composition is cast in gypsum. The living material disappears, while the record of its contact with the surface remains.

The process is both precise and unpredictable. Each plant responds differently to pressure and material, so the final composition emerges through an ongoing dialogue between plant, material and artistic decision.

Developing the practice

From individual botanical imprints towards larger, layered and spatially more complex compositions.

My current work focuses on expanding the scale and visual language of botanical relief, allowing different plant structures, materials and environments to shape increasingly complex compositions.

Scale and composition

I am developing my practice towards larger and more complex relief works in which multiple botanical imprints form a single visual environment. Repetition, rhythm, density and empty space allow individual plant structures to become part of a larger composition.

Plants and material

Each plant brings its own physical character to the process. Delicate flowers, ferns, leaves, stems, branches and seed heads respond differently to pressure and material. These differences influence both the surface of the relief and the artistic decisions made while composing the work.

Time and seasonality

My practice follows the rhythms of the growing season. Fresh plant material is available only at particular moments, and its structure changes as it grows, flowers, produces seed and fades. This makes time an active element of the work: the same material encounter cannot always be repeated.

Place and environment

I am increasingly interested in how the vegetation of a particular place can shape the visual language of a relief. Forests, meadows, shores and other environments offer different structures, densities and rhythms. Rather than depicting these places as landscapes, I explore how something of their character can remain through the physical imprints of the plants found there.