Meanwhile, for her 0CO2 Leather project, California-born designer Andrea Liu has been experimenting with fish skin, employing traditional tanning techniques from Alaska and elsewhere. Fish skin leather is now common, but Liu’s interest is not in the desirable whole skins, but the damaged scraps that emerge from the fish-smoking process. ‘It’s like a different category of waste – very holey, with a kind of wabi-sabi effect,’ she says.
Working with this has called on her craft skills. ‘I found weaving to be an effective way of working with this material – it’s already deconstructed to a certain extent, so why not deconstruct it further, then re-piece it together?’ This laborious process of tanning and weaving also had another effect. ‘The awareness of how the material came to be triggered a feeling of treasuring every bit,’ she says. ‘By being committed to using waste, I learned how not to waste.’
This is an extract from an article that first appeared in the July/August 2019 issue of Crafts magazine