SCOBY Lamp
air-dried walnut, SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacterias and yeast), 2019
A scoby is a gelatinous, translucent, fleshy-looking culture that is used to ferment kombucha, a naturally carbonated tea drink. The scoby lives off of sugar and nutrients from sweetened tea and grows thicker as it ferments.
This lamp shade was made with a home-grown dried scoby. Rather than striving to use the bio-leather as a replacement for animal leather or other soft-good fabrics, I sought to emphasize the material’s translucency through backlighting to reveal its organic surface of wrinkles and folds, which resembles other natural film materials like dried animal skin or fruit leather.
