Julia Lohmann’s seaweed sculptures look like they’ve wandered out of a science fiction movie and agreed to pose for a museum photograph. Their skins curl around exposed ribs, with open mouths and looping bodies that suggest creatures nobody has named yet. I like that they’re a little strange. For a project concerned with our relationship to nature, making the material difficult to ignore feels like a sensible place to start.

The work is Kelp Council, an installation made for More than Human at London’s Design Museum, which ran from July 11 through October 5, 2025. It addresses a design problem that doesn’t get solved by swapping one material for another: how to use nature without treating it as an endless supply closet. Lohmann gives seaweed a presence beyond its usefulness to us, inviting visitors to consider the organisms behind a potential design material.

Designer: Julia Lohmann

In the museum’s installation photograph, the surfaces range from olive green to warm amber and deep reddish brown. Light catches the thin skins, while the curved framework stays visible underneath. One form folds around a large opening; another flares outward like an oversized sea creature’s collar. The exposed construction matters. You can read the relationship between skin and support rather than seeing a perfectly smooth shell that conceals how it was assembled.

That relationship has been developing for years. Lohmann’s earlier Oki Naganode, installed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2013, used Japanese Naga seaweed treated to remain flexible, then stretched across a modular cane and aluminum framework. That project helps explain the material thinking behind her practice: seaweed can behave like a translucent covering, with enough visual character to become the reason for an object’s form. It doesn’t need to impersonate injection-molded plastic to be worth our attention.

Lohmann began exploring seaweed in 2007 and founded the Department of Seaweed in 2013, bringing together research, experimentation, and making. The name sounds enjoyably bureaucratic for a group dealing with such unruly material. Its stated position is serious, though. Seaweed-based alternatives only make sense, the group argues, when marine ecosystems and wild algae stocks come first. A renewable material still requires decisions about where it comes from and how it is grown.

Kelp Council adds another layer through sound. The installation includes a soundscape of rising and falling tides by Ville Aslak Raasakka and Lohmann, alongside seaweed species collected in Europe and East Asia. I appreciate that choice because it connects the gallery objects to a setting beyond the gallery. The word “council” also gives the gathering a slightly theatrical premise: humans are invited into a conversation whose other participants usually have no representation.

That premise could easily become precious, but the material keeps it grounded. In a Wallpaper* interview, Lohmann warned against responding to seaweed’s potential by simply harvesting more wild stock, which would create further problems for those habitats. To me, that caution is the strongest element of the project. The sourcing remains part of the design, even after the sculpture is finished. Any enthusiasm about seaweed replacing conventional materials needs to leave room for that distinction.

Of course, an installation cannot establish that a material is ready for your next lampshade or chair. A compelling sculpture alone can’t tell us what a mass-produced version would cost, how long it would last in a home, or what its full environmental footprint would be. I’d want those answers before calling it a practical replacement. As an exhibition piece, though, it has a different job: making those questions feel worth asking.

I’m more persuaded by the visible ribs and uneven colors than I would be by a perfectly uniform sheet advertised as the next miracle biomaterial. They suggest a design process willing to work with what makes seaweed distinctive. Kelp Council leaves me wanting objects that retain more of that identity, along with better information about their origins. If the material has a story, the finished design ought to let some of it show.

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