Austeya Platukyte uses her research to explore alternative material futures and question how natural fibres can be used as more sustainable alternatives to synthetic ones. Her work investigates biodegradable materials and aims to reduce the impact that humans leave behind.

An artist and a PhD student Platukyte looks into how materials transform during a creative process. She uses organic materials in her work and introduces new contexts, such as social, cultural and economic.

“My creative solutions are systematically linked to the theme of organic matter and a topic of materials transformation into other forms,” she says.

Her memories of childhood are permeated with creativity, and early explorations into the substances and earth around her ignited her love for natural materials. In her work as a designer Platukyte aims to interrogate the current ecological problems and raise awareness by posing philosophical questions on the subject of consumerism.

The collection included in the Cluster Crafts collection is called Invisible Objects. These were created in the quarantines of last spring.

“I had to prepare for an exhibition in Milan, which later became a virtual design festival, and it was difficult to buy materials I needed so I started to experiment with recycled paper material that you can simply make at home,” she explains. “For the objects’ inner construction, I used the wood scraps and cardboard boxes I found at home. First, I created a coffee table and a small cabin, and later I started to work on different lighting objects.”

By moving away from expected aesthetic, Platukyte claims to resist logic and the demands of functionality and instead explores materials and objects with a more imaginative sense of freedom. She explains that this freedom from design constraints allows her to rethink how the relationship between humans and nature can be questioned through design.

“I’m not one of those creators sitting at the white table,” she says. “Sometimes I just want to try a material, technique or test an idea, so I start experimenting right in my own kitchen.”

We encourage you to explore Platukyte’s work on the Cluster Crafts online exhibition pages, or for an even deeper experience you can bring her pieces to life by looking through her work on the pages of the Cluster Crafts book: “Soil, Surface, Sky”. By using simple, integrated QR codes you can call each artist’s work into being with 3D renders that appear on demand. The book also contains personal stories of how the pandemic affected each of our designers.

Swedish bioartist Amanda Selinder also explores natural fibres in her design work. She works with living organisms that effect the materials in different ways, leaving their mark in coloured patterns or imprints. She collects the specimens she needs to achieve this from the forest or uses micro-organisms that live on her own body.

The base fabrics are dyed with natural dyes made from plants, fungi, vegetables and soil. The pigments she extracts create her living spectrum of colour, which alters when it meets the slime or biofilm she layers onto her work.

“The last couple of years I’ve been investigating biofilm; a cellulose based material produced by bacteria that is everywhere around us, in us and on our skin,” she says. “I’ve been cultivating biofilm in large-scale format in my studio and naturally dyeing them because the bacterial colonies that are living in this slimy substance are absorbing different amount of pigment.”

The collection is called Urdjur, and features the slime mold physarum polycephalum, which is cultivated on light silk fabric and dyed with indigo. This particular natural organism is primitive and belongs neither to the animal or plant kingdom and has the ability to move, memorise things and leaves behind itself a track of slime as it searches for food. It conducts this search with rhythmic, pulsing movements that leave traces on Selinder’s material.

In the installation Urdjur, Selinder explored the movement of the slime mold in relationship to other material and how it changes over time. Microscopic images that are silkscreen printed on light silk fabric intertwines with the yellow network and the slime tracks the slime mold leaves behind.

“The behaviours make us question the human perception about intelligence, the relationship between human/organism and the crack that has occurred through history because the human thinks she can whip nature to obedience.”

Selinder’s work is intended to question the perception of intelligent being and call into doubt the common idea that the human is superior to other living things in the world.

Selinder believes humans have come to assume they have some control over nature, and her work intends to reveal that nature is not so obedient after all. Even within the context of an intentional art piece, a living thing has a wildness that the artist cannot direct.

By using micro-organisms that grow on her own skin, Selinder is revealing the symbiosis between the human body and nature.

“In my artistic research I’m working with living processes that the human body are living in symbiosis with or have to relate to in one or another way. I’m investigating our relationship, often with organisms that are in such a small scale that the naked eye isn’t able to see it,” she says. “The last couple of years I’ve been investigating biofilm; a cellulose based material produced by bacteria that is everywhere around us, in us and on our skin. I’ve been cultivating biofilm in large-scale format in my studio and naturally dyeing them because the bacterial colonies that are living in this slimy substance are absorbing different amount of pigment.”

Selinder’s work is also exhibited in our online Cluster Crafts collection and can be experienced in the pages of the Cluster book.