As a model, I am used to wearing clothes weighted by fashion labels and ideas of who we want to be, but feeling the soothing sensation of the seaweed against my skin elevated me away from our social constructs and towards what we really are: organic beings, living in an organic world.
For artist Katrín Thorvaldsdottir, the draw of the sea that surrounds her native Iceland was hard to ignore. She began to use seaweed in her creative practice, turning the marine algae into artworks and clothes that transcend nature.
Iceland: the land of fire and ice. Rolling ashy beaches, mist-wreathed mountains, cerulean glacier tongues, simmering volcanoes and bubbling hot springs. Its spectacular and rugged landscape was forged by the volcanoes and glaciers that continue to make and remake Iceland’s powerful nature and influence its distinctive culture.
It was this ecological ethos that drew Katrín back to her home country three decades ago. Having spent several years studying and working as a puppeteer and mask maker in Spain, Katrín was looking for a new way to express her creativity. She became reacquainted with Iceland’s distinctive elvish folktales, which offer centuries-old guidelines for how people can live with the environment and not in opposition to it. This spiritual reawakening drew Katrín to the sea; she walked along the coast, listening to the sound of the rolling tide and realising that what she had been lacking was a different type of material. As she scooped up its slick flesh in her hands, she discovered that material was seaweed.
The cultivation of seaweed has a long history. As a food source, it was first mentioned in the Nordic sagas and has been a staple of Japanese, Chinese and Korean diets for thousands of years. Rich in iodine and magnesium, this nutritionally dense algae contains anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial and cancer-fighting compounds that are also used for medical purposes around the world. During the First World War, seaweed made one of its first recorded transitions from foodstuff to an alternative material, when it was harvested for use in the production of gunpowder; today seaweed can be found in skincare products and even housing insulation. But it is in our contemporary battle against the climate crisis that it is now playing its most integral role, absorbing carbon emissions, regenerating of marine ecosystems and use as both a biofuel and renewable plastic.
“We sometimes forget that we are living on a planet and that the ocean is the womb of the earth,” Katrín says as she guides me around her studio, which stretches out into several rooms beneath her home in Reykjavik. Ethereal masks made from oarweed, sugar kelp and wakame curtain the windows and hang suspended from the ceiling. Every surface, from the long workbench to the sideboards, is draped with seaweed in various stages of transformation. There is a briny saltiness to the air and I marvel at this living archive of Katrín’s 30-year exploration and dedication to one primary material. “Seaweed brings out this interconnection, something that you didn’t know you had,” Katrín continues. “Working with it has taught me where I come from and that I’m a part of nature”.
Along the harbour of Reykjavik is a cluster of rocks that gleam amongst the otherwise grey stones. The Shore Piece is an artwork by the Icelandic artist Sigurður Guðmundsson, who took the rocks from the shore, polished them until they shined and placed them back. The point, as Katrín explains, was to celebrate the beauty of nature and how it is within all of us. “People don’t respect things if they can’t see them,” Katrín says, “so while I’m aware that seaweed is being used as a thread in textiles, it isn’t being seen. My work has been to utilise and showcase the beauty of seaweed.” It was this desire that first led Katrín into forming Emblamar Studios, which fosters cross-disciplinary collaborations in the materiality of seaweed. Naturally, fashion seemed like a fitting place to model out the beauty of kelp and led to the studio’s conception of the Transform project. Aided by the fashion creative Charlie Stand, Emblamar Studio invited nine designers to independently experiment with seaweed as a potential textile.
This shared interest in organic materials drew the Icelandic fashion designer Drífa Thoroddsen into the project. “My mind was constantly challenged into thinking more openly during the project as the seaweed can be so fragile and yet incredibly sturdy,” Drifa tells me. “It has a mind of its own and the only thing that can be done is to follow the path that the material lays for itself.” From a leathery corset top to trousers striped with silky browns and yellows and a crystalline dress in jadelike greens, the resulting garments are a testament to the designers letting go of their expectations and opening themselves up to creative serendipity. This liberation from constraints is a huge reason why Katrín has spent so long working with seaweed. “It allows you to be open to life, open to learn and open to feeling an exchange of energy and this freedom that you know you are a part of something.”
Stepping out of the studio setup of a typical fashion shoot, I experienced my own sense of transcendence modelling within Iceland’s dramatic landscape. As a model, I am used to wearing clothes weighted by fashion labels and ideas of who we want to be, but feeling the soothing sensation of the seaweed against my skin elevated me away from our social constructs and towards what we really are: organic beings, living in an organic world. It’s a sentiment that the South African pattern-cutter Victoria Pietrasik also discovered on the Transform project. “ Even though the seaweed can be a bit icky, it creates this psychological connection to the earth, like how like how when you garden and you get your hands in the soil and you are kind of dirty and you kind of feel good,” she says. “We’ve lost that connection living in big cities; we don’t get enough of that.”
For Katrín, seaweed should be welcomed as a positive antidote to the doom and gloom of the climate crisis. Although humanity has gone a little astray, she believes that we are still on a journey and that optimism should be our guiding light. “We are made of carbon, nature is made of carbon, it is within all of us,”, she tells me. “So we start with ourselves, how we behave, our intuition, our heart. We must take care of it and listen to that, and only then can we see the direction we must take.”
Model: Jess Cole. Casting by: Emmi Grundström.Photography assistant: Dominic Marks. Special thanks to The Reykjavík Edition.