Anyone who’s decried the seasonal blip we call autumn knows how rapidly nature can swing from verdant greenery to leafless branches. The same goes for the missed watering of an overlooked houseplant: skip a week and bear witness to browning edges that curl into a crisp. As quickly as these natural changes occur, so do their remedies or downfalls, and soon we’re spotting new buds or depositing the evidence of our negligence in the compost bin.

For Álvaro Urbano, the brief period between blossom and decay is one to be preserved. He sculpts common plants from metal, casting vulnerable life forms into a sturdy material and rendering their colors and textures in paint. It’s an act of making “small monuments of things that normally would disappear or change in a few days, or in minutes,” the artist says.

Drawing on theater and architecture, Urbano is deeply interested in creating not only standalone works but immersive scenes. His sculptures often leave a trail of leaves on the floor or appear to grow directly from the stark gallery wall, their knotted branches jutting out into the space. “The viewer can enter these situations as if they are witnesses (to) a scene that has already started,” the artist adds.

Urbano lives and works between Paris and Berlin and has work on view in the latter at Spore Initiative. Find more on Instagram.