Julia Lohmann's Kelp Council Asks Who Speaks for the Ocean

Five towering kelp sculptures now stand in a circle at London's Design Museum, forming German-born designer Julia Lohmann's installation Kelp Council for the 2025 exhibition More than Human. Translucent skins stretch across ribbed frameworks. The forms resemble unfamiliar creatures raised from the ocean floor.

The installation carries an argument. Lohmann imagines marine organisms gathered to discuss the condition of their environment, and visitors are invited to join the conversation. As designers turn to seaweed as an alternative to conventional materials, she raises the question that follows: what happens when a natural resource meets growing industrial demand? Through sculpture and material experiments, she asks how design might work with nature while accounting for the living systems behind its materials.

Where did the seaweed work begin?

The thread runs back to 2004, when Lohmann created Waltraud Cow-Bench, a leather-covered piece of furniture shaped as a reclining cow. By returning a familiar material to the form of the animal it came from, she exposed a relationship that production normally erases. That logic eventually pushed her toward marine algae.

During a 2013 residency at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, she founded the Department of Seaweed, a collaborative research initiative studying the properties of kelp and its design applications. Working with scientists and other specialists, she developed techniques that let the material's natural characteristics shape the sculptural result rather than override them.

When does kelp shape the structure?

Two 2020 works show the method. In Kombu Ahtola, pieces of seaweed stretch between the ribs of a rattan framework. As the kelp dries, it contracts and pulls the structure into its curved form. The material determines the final geometry. The process accepts a degree of unpredictability that most fabrication protocols would reject.

Her Hidaka Ohmu pavilion scales the experiments up to architecture. The structure measures approximately six meters across and wears translucent seaweed panels that filter light into its curved interior. Visitors walk through it and feel the texture and physical presence of a material more commonly associated with the ocean.

What changes for practitioners?

Kelp forests support complex marine ecosystems and provide habitats for numerous species. Seaweed offers promising possibilities for material development, but expanding its cultivation and harvesting introduces ecological questions of its own. Lohmann's research considers how these resources might be used while preserving the environments that sustain them.

Kelp Council reframes that concern as speculation. By imagining marine organisms in discussion, she asks whose interests enter the decisions made about natural resources. The sculptures connect her early leather work to her ongoing seaweed research through a single proposition: the future of sustainable design depends as much on how we obtain materials as on what we make from them. For architects and designers eyeing algae as the next biomaterial, the warning is structural. Supply chains count.

Project info:

• Designer: Julia Lohmann
• Installation: Kelp Council, More than Human, Design Museum, London, 2025