Ori Orisun Merhav: The Beauty and Possibility of an Insect-produced Polymer

A conversation between Ori Orisun Merhav, Tom Samson and Elizabeth Gregory | Section: Interviews

Abstract: Journalist Elizabeth Gregory speaks to designer and material researcher Ori Orisun Merhav and material engineer Tom Samson about their fascinating individual and collaborative practices, mutualism and biomimicry, the possibilities of an insect-produced polymer – and the importance of the convergence of science and design in their work.

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Ori Orisun Merhav is a designer and material researcher. A graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, she’s the founder of research studio Made By Insects and an associated researcher at the Bio-Polymer Lab of Avans Hogeschool in the Netherlands. Merhav develops materials and cutting-edge technologies for a sustainable future. She is particularly interested in the possibilities of a polymer produced by Kerria Lacca insects. To display and communicate her material findings, Merhav creates biomorphic objects and installation works. Over the last six months, Merhav has collaborated with material engineer Tom Samson – the founder of bio-inspired laboratory Reflexlab – to develop new techniques and push the boundaries between science and design. In this conversation, journalist Elizabeth Gregory speaks to Ori Orisun Merhav and Tom Samson about their fascinating practices, their collaborative process, mutualism and biomimicry, and the importance of the convergence of science and design in their work.

Ori Orisun Merhav, can you tell me a little about your story? How did you arrive at your current practice? How did the connection between science and the visual arts develop for you?
OM: I’ve always had this passion about the objects around us, and how they design us in a way; how the interaction with our environment affects how we are. I knew since I was young that I wanted to go to the Design Academy in Eindhoven: it appeared to be a place where nerds gather together and can be who they are. When I started studying there I felt less alone.

At the university, I started developing my fascination with material and material research. One of the agendas that I found interesting was how material can shape the way we construct. I realised that there are more ways to use materials. We have the set of five main materials, such as metal, concrete and glass, and we just see them all the time, everywhere. But anything is a material – a waste of coffee beans, it’s also material.

In my last year at the Academy, I was looking into relationships in nature, and I was specifically looking into mutualism, which is a relationship where there are two species that learn to coexist. Although only one is actively consuming from the other, there is this balance of consuming – just enough to survive – but not too much to ruin the other’s ecosystem. It really touched me. And then I came across the Kerria Lacca insects that I’ve been looking into over the past three years. That’s how the fascination started.

And you Tom?
TS: I explain the Reflexlab as a fabrication and research lab. The starting point of my research is the manufacturing system. My background is material science, but I’ve also been working in the field of machine and mechanical design. So, at its origin, I was inspired by, and incorporated, scientific research in the field of biomaterial 3D printing. By building my own machines, I started to explore the field and ask, okay, what can I make with them?

At some point, a lot of my surroundings were people really interested in the field of arts. I trained in art schools, doing painting. I knew that science was my passion, and I wanted to go this way, but it was really hard to select between science and design for me. I went to science, but always with the will to use science to do something creative. Now the Reflexlab has different systems, and I try to enrich my material portfolio. I try to find projects in collaboration with designers, and most of the time I act as the engineering mind in those collaborations. My key activity is really to allow the creative to think the other way around.

What do you mean by this Tom?
TS: Most of the thought processes that are learned in school are like: first you make your design, then you identify which material you will use for this design, then you will end up selecting the process to make it. I really like to approach things the other way around and say, okay, let’s start from the process. Let’s design the process. And then when we have all the limitations, this will actually format the best design – one that is adapted to the manufacturing process and also the material.

OM: With material-driven research, you really start with the material, and you trust the journey. I realised that with a scientific approach, when you start your research, you always need to outline your end goal. And I find this very scary as an artistic researcher. You have a fascination, and you see potential in something, but you definitely don’t want to know the end result.

I think in general, when science and art meet in the engineering mind, the outcome is often quite novel. There is this balance between being playful and being concrete, as much as these different approaches can create tensions during the process, mostly the end result is unique, creating a new realm which was not possible for each partner on their own.

Can you tell me more about your interdisciplinary collaboration?
OM: Tom and I met through the research that we’ve now been independently working on for almost two years. We are now developing a manufacturing technique to print the insect-produced polymer lacquer. We both have this fascination for insects. Tom was previously also researching an insect-based material. I think the strength of both of us together, and why we got so excited to collaborate, is that we can support each other to bring this research into the next step. It’s a complimentary meeting point.

TS: This meeting point represents the possibility of reimagining the use of the material in another context – bringing my technical knowledge to Ori and allowing her to go further and imagine new possibilities for practice.

Can you tell me more about the insects?
OM: So the insects are the size of a grain of sand. They pierce the bark of a branch, they start being fed on the sugar and secreting the polymer, and the insects create an ecosystem of a cocoon with the material. They have this mutualistic relationship with their tree host.

What is the polymer currently used for?
OM: Traditionally, the polymer in industry terms is known as Shellac. It’s being used as a coating material. Decades ago, Shellac was everywhere. But as we started developing more and more synthetic polymers, the demand for Shellac has rapidly decreased. Today some violins are varnished with Shellac, and it’s used in the pharmaceutical industry.

You conducted fieldwork in Thailand as part of your practice?
OM: When I became interested in the insects, I connected to a research group in Thailand that was looking into the agricultural part of the polymer material. We exchanged emails for two months, and then I spent one month in Thailand, in the fields, conducting interviews and learning to study the natural habitat of the insects.

I didn’t feel comfortable to start making my own opinions about the polymer before I was actually in that environment, engaging with locals whose life practice is to cultivate the insects and to produce this material. That’s also one of the main open discourses that I still have with the group in Thailand, because I hope, or my dream, is that my practice can somehow revive their practice, because they have less and less demand, and harvesting Shellac is becoming more of a side job for many farmers.

How is the polymer made?
OM: It takes 10 months for the insects to form a cocoon shape. They lay eggs inside the cocoons and only when the eggs are breaking out, then the material is being harvested. So the material is the leftover on the insect’s life cycle. It’s scraped off the branches and crushed at the factory and washed. The branches are later used for firewood, and the tree is still growing for the next season. Basically, then it’s Seedlac, and from seed it’s molten and then purified to get rid of the wood chips and stuff like that. But the material stays raw from the field. In this version, there are no other additives.

TS: It’s crazy for me that the materials straight from the tree can fit in an existing 3D printing system and begin to be printed. There is a lot of research to master the technique, but it’s done without any modification of the material.

Ori, why do you choose to create biomorphic objects and installation works with the insect polymer?
OM: It’s a question I asked myself a lot: what shape should the polymer take? At the moment it’s about creating this new relationship between humans and nature, and how we feel like we are entering a new era in this relationship. A friend of mine said that my objects can be either from the past after the apocalypse, or the future beyond. I liked this because I think an end is also a beginning of something new. So this spot in between is interesting for me to work in.

The reason I have mainly experimented with functional art so far is because I feel like people need help to imagine things in their space. I’m a sculptor when I created the work, but I like to give a hint of reality, and that’s where I find science fiction interesting – when it has these very familiar elements, but you play on the abstraction of them. I hope people will slowly imagine these materials intertwining in our interiors.

Can you tell us more about the challenges of communicating new ideas and materials?
TS: Technical barriers are not the only barrier to introducing new materials into our everyday life. This is why for me, building an interdisciplinary team is the key, because the change needs to be cultural, not only technical. It needs to come with storytelling, because otherwise we will not be able to change habits.

What I envision, and what actually drove me in the beginning to do this is the aim to create a new industrial field. I’m imagining with these new materials, these biomaterials, and just more natural materials, that there needs to be a whole industry working with them, creating employment. It can happen, but it will take years. The path in order to make material designers like Ori be able to convert their research into a real-world application is not completely defined yet. There is a lot of stuff to learn.

Right, and human beings don’t typically find wonder and beauty in insects.
OM: In creating, I think a lot about taking scientific outcomes and approaches, but translating them into something that is familiar, and showing that insects can be cool in a way. There is a cultural aspect, and how we educate each other. That’s why we chose to put the insects in the front in this branding. Because initially, insects are … as humans they’re not appealing to us. But insects are beings with a lot of wisdom.

I hope by creating beauty and still using them in the brand’s identity, to create new connections with how we see and envision insects – to show all of these other sides. What other creature can take sugar from a tree and make it into a polymer? Or the way they function. Insects are very collaborative beings. They almost always live in colonies. And they’re so tiny, but they still create big structures.

My latest, let’s say, blowing language (my material blowing technique), is based on the cocoons of the insects. When I started blowing it was only in big individual volumes, and they would tend to be so brittle and very hard to transport. And then I thought about the insects’ architecture. I was looking at the cross-section of the cocoon and it is built from a lot of small little cells that connect into one structure.

Having a focus on process, and a flexibility towards outcome, seems crucial to understanding your practice.
OM: When we are designing, especially new technologies and techniques, we’re designing for the future. And while doing so – people don’t talk about it enough – but so many things along the way don’t work out. It has happened to me when exhibiting work: it’s breaking because it’s a bio-based material, it’s sensitive, it’s alive, it’s all new. So many experiments don’t work out, but we live for the ones that do.

Can you talk more about the way that biomimicry and bio-inclusivity are conceptual bridges both between science and art, and your practices?
OM: Biomimicry is a topic that Tom and I are both separately fascinated in, and we’re going to slowly bring it together. How can we learn from the wisdom in nature, bringing biomimicry or biomimicry-inspired practices, into our design language? And, as we said, also slowly enhancing the properties of the polymer, and seeing how we can slowly develop a future outside of only artistic approaches.

A big part of Made By Insects is the research into everyday life, using craft and the concept of bio-inclusivity. The goal of being, let’s say, 100% bio based, I don’t think it’s a realistic goal in the next 100 years. I think for me radicalism is to say we are allowed to mix these materials with our existing knowledge.

If we allow ourselves just to slowly build this future archive, but intertwine it with our existing reality, I hope that’s how slowly we can get to somewhere new. So, in my practice, I’m developing more sculptural works. The objects have this strong relationship to our existing interior language, but with a new approach to showcase my vision, and ask how nature, art and design intertwine.

Finally, Ori and Tom, could you share what kind of knowledge emerges from the collaboration (at the science-art interface) and the art works? And how this enhances your individual work?
TS: The work has given me ideas because I’m working with other materials too. For example, right now I’m also doing experiments using this polymer in a composite material. At the beginning I just wanted to test the feasibility of doing so – and it works pretty well. And now I’m thinking about whether we can have the same approach with the Shellac. In the next project that we will do with Shellac, I will always try to hide the scientific information of an experiment – which will mostly result in design or art objects – inside its production. I think there is some interesting stuff to do regarding this. What we are producing is not only an object, but also a way of gathering data, learning.

OM: While seeing the printer printing, it helped me to design a new language in blowing. So, there is always an exchange between technology and craft. I’m now an associate researcher at the Advanced Bio-Polymer Lab, and having these interactions in the lab and seeing how my colleagues think, how they archive data, how their tools work, is slowly shaping how I envision this new practice.

I see how, by visiting them and having these intersections, it has made me redesign my space and how to function in the space. I hope to build, slowly, a new craft and new technologies together with Tom in this polymer material, and by doing so, also building a new way of thinking and aesthetics. I hope more people will take part in functioning in this space with Tom, and new team members. I think everyone you bring into your nest in a way contributes and the ideas just keep exchanging. I hope we can always have that.

Ori Orisun Merhav, thank you for the interesting and insightful conversation.

Picture above the text: Insects Polymer Blown Cocoon (2024). Photo: Ori Orisun Merhav.

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Ori Orisun Merhav is a designer and material researcher. A graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, she’s the founder of research studio Made By Insects and an associated researcher at the Bio-Polymer Lab of Avans Hogeschool in the Netherlands.

Tom Samson is a material engineer and founder of bio-inspired laboratory Reflexlab, with degrees from Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Ingénieurs en Arts Chimiques et Technologiques. He specialises in the fields of additive manufacturing and ecological materials.

Elizabeth Gregory is a journalist and researcher. Driven by an interest in human and scientific connection, she has written on topics including art exhibitions, design innovations and nature documentaries. In her degrees she focused on memory and security, and perceptions of light in the Arctic.

How to cite this article

Ori Orisun Merhav, Tom Samson & Elizabeth Gregory (2025): Ori Orisun Merhav: The Beauty and Possibility of an Insect-produced Polymer. w/k–Between Science & Art Journal. https://doi.org/10.55597/e10040