Brùchd - Seaweed Biomaterials

Category: Accessories

Brùchd (Gaelic for beach-cast seaweed) is a coastal biomaterials practice developed on Arran and the Clyde, built from three material streams: a sodium alginate bio-yarn for creel fishing rope, an iota carrageenan bio-leather for Arran's makers, and natural dyes drawn from oarweed, knotted wrack and bladderwrack. This entry is a sling bag, hand-finished on Arran, that carries both of the project's core materials in one object. The body is carrageenan leather, cast from a single species of wild-harvested red seaweed, hydrated, sheet-cast and air-dried using the same studio process developed across the project's material trials. The strap is the alginate bio-yarn itself, the same cordage spun for the Clyde creel fleet's rope, here carrying a shoulder instead of a catch. The grain, the give and the small irregularities at the seams come from the material itself, not from imitation. It's built to hold the weight of a day's catch, or a week's shopping, and to wear in the way real leather does. The leather is left honest rather than disguised: it conditions and softens with handling, and like any natural leather it's kept from prolonged wet weather rather than sold as waterproof, a known property of carrageenan, stated rather than hidden. What makes the bag possible is the same logic that runs through the whole Brùchd system: a coastal material processed and finished by the community it comes from, rather than shipped in from elsewhere and shipped back out as a finished good. Grown there, made there, returned there. Holdfast to the shore. Rooted in the coast.

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