This commission at V&A Dundee is a bespoke lighting and sculptural work based on the organic forms and translucent colours of seaweed.

This project builds on the techniques employed in other lighting designs I have developed over the last few years under the name Urpflanze. For the Tatha Bar and restaurant area, housed in the V&A Dundee, I produced a large-scale lighting display based on seaweed and its histories.

Collecting and pressing seaweed was a popular pastime in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain. The industrial-era hobby became predominantly associated with women, combining the quest for scientific knowledge, new-found romantic ideas about the natural world, and a craft-based leisure activity akin to scrapbooking. Aligning with feminine stereotypes of the time, women were encouraged to collect and study 'flowers of the sea.'

This lighting design reflects upon the complex relationship between gender and the decorative arts. Shapes based on pressed oarweed are laser-cut from cast acrylic and heat-formed into three-dimensional volumes. In this sense, this process is the inverse of the seaweed pressing technique, which requires a three-dimensional object to be flattened into two dimensions.

This project was developed with 442 design, Edinburgh.