Ann Wood's Paper Flowers, Fruit, and Insects Are a Sight to Behold

Everyone knows what a peach looks like. It's round, fuzzy, and the color of a Santa Fe sunset. Cut the fruit open, and it's yellow, with a craggy brown pit inside. But if you're Ann Wood, the Minneapolis-based artist who creates paper sculptures of fruit and flowers so lifelike they could fool a hive of bees, these details are merely a starting point. Take her peach, which she depicts split open in half, still attached to its branch. She has replicated the subtle mottling of creamy yellow, orange, and pink skin, as well as the dark-auburn nodes on the stems. Inside, she's painted the ruby-red halo surrounding the pit. She's even conjured a small bruise on the flesh, to echo the spot in the real example she used as a model. "I'm not interested in an idealized fruit or flower," says the artist, whose Instagram account, @woodlucker, has 120,000 awestruck followers. "This is a very specific peach."

Pictured here: A buffet of lifelike fruits proves irresistible to fantastical butterflies. Before she started rendering botanicals about four years ago, Wood had a decades-long career in making folk-art-inspired mechanical sculptures. It was the death of her parents that prompted her new path. "When my father, who was a farmer, was in the last ages of illness, sometimes we would sit outside together and look at plants," she recalls. "I remember him pointing out some sumac and saying that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. That really resonated with me."

Wood began experimenting with her own techniques for making paper flora, using acrylic paints and methods she developed from her practice as a mixed-media sculptor and painter. "I don't use crepe paper," she says. She prefers stock that ranges in thickness, from tissue-weight to heavy, and employs many different materials, from wood forms to wire. For a bleeding-heart plant, she found that a bit of fiber-fill stuffing inside the blooms achieved the perfect amount of plumpness. A group of blackberries, so real they look like they'll stain your fingers, is made from tiny beads. At first Wood used botanical illustrations as references, but now she works with live specimens, often dissecting them to better understand their construction. And she grows many of her floral muses in her own garden.

"I'm most interested in common garden flowers, because they're relatable," says Wood, who is drawn to begonias, geraniums, and marigolds. "I like making things my parents would have enjoyed."

Wood's repertoire also includes bees, beetles, flies, ladybugs, and wasps. "They're larger than life-size and not intended to be realistic," says the artist, who carves their bodies, at more than double the size of real insects, out of wood. "To me, they're the jewelry of the garden."

This hibiscus is one of Wood's most complicated creations, thanks to its stamen, which includes dozens of minuscule filaments and anthers made out of fine wire. "I trashed two versions before I got it right," says the artist, whose tool kit includes utility knives, tweezers, fine-nose pliers, and Fiskars micro-tip scissors. "It's similar to jewelry-making."

For this pair of peaches, Wood carved the fruit out of wood and painted spidery white veins on the paper leaves with a fine-point brush.

Each new marvel Wood finishes is a step toward her ultimate goal: a wall installation of five hundred or so pieces, conceived as a meditation on nature, time, and fertility. This magnum opus, she hopes, will eventually be exhibited to the public. (And before you ask—alas, no, she doesn't sell individual works.) "I'm interested in the evanescence of life," she says of her astonishing attention to detail. "It's almost a way of stopping time."