Five kelp sculptures stand in a ring at London’s Design Museum, and the julia lohmann kelp sculptures look like creatures hauled up from the seabed. Pale, translucent skins stretch over ribbed frames. The installation, Kelp Council, is part of the 2025 exhibition More than Human.
German-born designer Julia Lohmann built the work around a simple premise. Marine organisms gather to discuss the state of their environment, and visitors are invited to join the conversation.
The piece also asks a practical question about seaweed design. Designers increasingly reach for seaweed as a substitute for conventional materials. Lohmann wants to know what happens to the ecosystems that supply it when demand rises.
This story is part of a designboom series presented in partnership with INDX|GLOBAL, a global cultural platform that connects Indian architecture, design and creative intelligence with the wider world.
From animal bodies to living materials
Lohmann’s interest in where materials come from began long before her seaweed work. Her 2004 Waltraud Cow-Bench is a leather-covered seat shaped like a reclining cow. The piece returns the material to the animal it came from.
Her Ruminant Blooms lamps followed. They use preserved linings of cow and sheep stomachs. Lohmann has said viewers first noticed the texture’s beauty, and only then recognised its origin. That moment of discomfort, she argues, is worth provoking.
Seaweed entered her practice in 2007. During a design residency in Sapporo, Japan, she found konbu folded in long lengths at a fish market. It looked like veneer or wood. Local people ate it but made nothing else from it, so she decided to try.
In 2013, during a residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, she founded the Department of Seaweed. The project treats seaweed as seriously as glass, silverware or ceramics, materials that already have their own departments at the museum. Most seaweed objects have not been made yet, so the department looks ahead as much as back. Visitors can smell, taste and touch the material, and they can shape its future.
Another take on the Design Museum’s stage is Es Devlin’s rotating colour-coded library, which shows how light can reshape a familiar room.
How julia lohmann kelp sculptures take shape
In Kombu Ahtola (2020), sheets of seaweed are stretched between the ribs of a rattan frame. As the kelp dries, it contracts and pulls the structure into a curve. The material, not the maker alone, decides much of the final shape.
Her Hidaka Ohmu pavilion, also from 2020, is a walk-through structure with a shell of semi-transparent seaweed over lightweight rattan. The pavilion is about six metres across. Another account describes it as roughly six metres across. Inside, light filters through the panels, and the air carries the smell of the sea.
The title points to Japan.
The julia lohmann kelp sculptures keep changing. Humidity, temperature and light alter the colour and texture of the stems. Lohmann accepts this as part of the piece rather than a flaw to correct.
Who gets a say
Kelp forests shelter many marine species.
Lohmann is cautious about the material’s rising profile. In a 2019 interview with Icon, she said she felt both excited and wary. Replacing other materials with seaweed will not help if farming damages the places it grows, she argued. Seaweed grown in the right way and place can draw excess nutrients out of the water, and that is the outcome she wants her own work to match.
Her critique extends to wild harvesting. Sustainable farming, she said, has to start from the ecosystem.
Critical Tide, a exhibition she co-curated at Designmuseo in Helsinki, pushes the point further. Lohmann says marine environments expose the limits of human-centred design. Non-human stakeholders are the ones most affected by decisions about the sea, so designers must find ways to give them attention and a voice.
She also raised concerns. Patenting biological processes can block innovation, and companies often expect quick results that biology cannot provide.
If the idea of non-human voices shaping design appeals to you, Posthuman Utopias Embracing Nature and Innovation explores where that thinking could lead.
Her reflections on responsibility are direct. The julia lohmann kelp sculptures put that idea into physical form, asking viewers to see the sea as a participant in design rather than a warehouse of raw material.
Source: designboom.com
Frequently asked questions
What is Julia Lohmann’s Kelp Council installation about?
Kelp Council is a ring of five kelp sculptures at London’s Design Museum, part of the 2025 exhibition More than Human. It is built on the premise that marine organisms gather to discuss the state of their environment, and visitors are invited to join the conversation.
Who designed the Kelp Council sculptures at the Design Museum?
The Kelp Council sculptures were designed by Julia Lohmann, a German-born designer. The work asks what happens to the ecosystems that supply seaweed when designers’ demand for it rises.
What is Julia Lohmann’s Department of Seaweed?
The Department of Seaweed is a project Lohmann founded in 2013 during a residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It treats seaweed as seriously as glass, silverware, or ceramics, and it looks ahead to objects that most seaweed materials have not yet been made into.
Why is Julia Lohmann wary of using seaweed as a material?
Lohmann argues that replacing other materials with seaweed will not help if farming damages the places where seaweed grows. She notes that seaweed grown in the right way and place can draw excess nutrients out of the water, which is the outcome she wants her own work to match.
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