Crafting with food waste: makers reimagine leftover fish

As part of a series of articles examining how craftspeople are transforming food leftovers – including meat, fruit and vegetables, dairy products and eggshells – we meet the designers and makers reinventing waste from the fishing industry into desirable, recycled materials and products.

Cape Town-based designer Jade Ruijzenaars’s Crangon Crangon ceramics are glazed using the shells of shrimp, which comprise up to 70 per cent of their bodies. The effect of incorporating these into glazes varies according to the other ingredients used, but the qualities of shell remain visible and the calcium residue leaves a whiteish sheen, creating textured surfaces that resemble the ocean itself. ‘To be clear, my ceramic shrimp glaze is not a solution to the waste issue,’ Ruijzenaars says. ‘The amount needed for ceramic production is in itself far too small. However, Crangon Crangon can play an important role in explaining the story of the shrimp industry and reducing the distance between the consumer and our food system.’

Dutch artist Marian Bijlenga’s use of fish scales in her intricate, wall-based sculptures is another light touch, artistic intervention that makes use of a material that would otherwise be ignored. She found the scales in a fish leather tannery in Iceland, a byproduct of a process that is already a byproduct. ‘The first experiments were with combinations of dried seaweed and fish scales,’ she says. ‘Then I started with wall panels made from these fish scales, stitched with a sewing machine on water-soluble fabric. I tried dyeing experiments with silk dye, water-resistant ink, henna and even lacquer with the dried sap of the acacia tree, which goes into the damaged parts of the scale.’ In her artworks, scales hover as if by magic, suspended by barely visible thread.

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