Insect-Made Shellac Becomes Glowing Sculpture in Brussels Studio

Brussels-based designer Ori Orisun Merhav has won a 2026 Dutch Design Award for building glowing sculptures and furniture from a natural polymer produced by insects smaller than a grain of sand. Through her research practice Made by Insects, she heats and blows the amber-colored material — commercially known as shellac — into clusters of translucent bubbles, some perched on branching steel structures, others suspended as elaborate chandeliers.

The material comes from tiny lac insects, known scientifically as Kerria lacca, roughly the size of a grain of sand. They attach themselves to the branches of host trees, feed on sap, and convert sugars into a natural resin that hardens around their bodies as a protective enclosure. Harvesters collect the hardened resin from the branches, wash it, and process it into shellac — a material humans have used for centuries in furniture finishing.

Where did the research begin?

Merhav first encountered the insects while researching ecological relationships during her studies at Design Academy Eindhoven. Fascinated by their ability to manufacture a polymer through their own biological processes, she traveled to Thailand to study lac cultivation and meet the communities who harvest it. The research became her 2022 graduation project, The Lac Lab Open Source, an evolving archive of material experiments that grew into Made by Insects. It also introduced her to the economic realities of shellac production: synthetic alternatives have steadily reduced demand for the natural resin.

How does she build with it?

Shellac softens when heated and hardens again as it cools, allowing Merhav to stretch it into thin membranes and blow it into hollow forms using techniques borrowed from glassmaking. Her earliest experiments produced large, individual bubbles, but their delicate walls made them brittle and difficult to transport. Looking more closely at the insects' own enclosures, she found they comprised many smaller, interconnected cells.

That observation changed her approach. She began blowing smaller volumes and joining them into larger structures, developing a language of clustered forms drawn directly from the insects' construction methods. In works such as Branching Insects Chandelier and Meet Me Under the Insects Tree, the amber bubbles grow along slender metal supports, casting warm light through uneven surfaces. The finished pieces have an almost botanical appearance, though their structural logic comes from insect shelters.

The experiments have since expanded into digital fabrication. Working with Ginger Additive, Reflexlab and Aeditto, Merhav produced her first 3D-printed shellac objects in 2023, later continuing the research with material engineer Tom Samson and the Bio-Polymer Lab at Avans University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. The process explores how a naturally occurring polymer can move through a printer without chemical modification. Her Morphopoiesis vessels rise in irregular, cellular walls, with ridges of deposited material forming dense networks around hollow interiors.

What's on show in London?

At Sarah Myerscough Gallery, Merhav's research has grown into an environment visitors can move through. Portal Into The Multi-Species runs from October 14th to November 7th, 2026, filling the gallery's entrance corridor with delicate shellac bubbles attached to steel branches.

Further inside, The Woven Insect Canopy holds palm sheaths coated in insect-produced resin within sculptural steel supports, their fibrous surfaces illuminated from within by LEDs. The series includes Awakening, Regeneration and Bifurcation — the latter reaching 140 centimeters in height. Light passes through the shellac-coated fibers to reveal their interwoven structure beneath the amber surface.

Merhav frames the work within mutualism: the insects depend on their host trees, farmers maintain the environments, and makers work the harvested resin. The work remains experimental, with the material's fragility and the demands of fabrication still shaping its possibilities. But her lamps and vessels offer a tangible glimpse of an unusual manufacturing future — an insect produces a polymer to protect itself, and generations later a designer finds a way to build with it.