Name: Julia Lohmann

Location: V&A Museum, UK and Finland

Specialist materials:

Products: Objects and products

Links [if available]: https://www.instagram.com/departmentofseaweed/?hl=en

Julia Lohmann, designer, researcher and educator, investigates and critiques the ethical and material value systems underpinning our relationship with nature. She is a Professor of Practice in Contemporary Design at Aalto University, Finland. Julia is contributing to research consortia relating to design, biomaterials, science and ecology. She holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art and her work is part of major public and private collections worldwide.

Julia is passionate about eco literacy and ocean protection. As a designer in residence at the V&A Museum in 2013, she founded the Department of Seaweed, a transdisciplinary community of practice exploring the sustainable development of seaweed as a material for making. Julia believes that any exploration of biomaterials needs to be based on amplifying their regenerative eco-systemic impact.

Through her practice-led research connecting creative practices and science, Julia has built in-depth knowledge of working with different genus of seaweed. Seaweed is fast growing, strong and supple and both growing wild and farmed it can improve biodiversity as a ‘counterforce’ to negative human impacts. Historically and culturally, seaweed is described as an (oddly) undeveloped or ‘blank spot’, as yet without extensive use in making and craft. Julia’s practice ‘fills in the gaps’ at a time when seaweed and its agency is a focus for marine restoration projects and applications on land. These range from foodstuffs and fertilisers to replacements for fossil-based materials like plastics, or animal-derived ones like leather. In her work with seaweed, Julia gives room to the agency of the marine organisms, all the way from their habitats in the sea to their use as materials for making. She believes in the importance of a more than human-centric mindset, which means that the maker is giving up authority and authorship in favour of letting the material form and curate its material story. ‘With care, the use of seaweed can help promote new ways of thinking about the ethics of eco-systems’. Design can play an important role in this, as a way of connecting knowing, caring and acting across disciplines and different levels of complexity.

Julia and the contributors to the Department of Seaweed are developing it as a network of locally situated but integrated and connected knowledge. Their aim is for it to become a multi-local umbrella under which experiences and opportunities of working with different macroalgae species can be shared and eco-social, regenerative practices can be scaled for impact.

Ecologists and environmental scientists engage with Julia’s practice as a critical craft and an opportunity to engage with the public through hands-on, experiential and multi-sensory interaction with seaweed and derived materials. The deep ‘care’ and ‘concerns’ of science and scientists can be explained and expressed through the physical interaction with made form.

Julia's objects seek to enable eco and marine literacy, sparking dialogues and co-speculation about marine biology and futures in which humanity and nature coexist for mutual benefit