Aon the wall of her studio in the Goudenregenstraat, patches and patches of different textiles hang in rows below one another. Each with a slightly different shade of red-brown each time. They are experiments on textiles with paint made from seaweed. Totally Nienke Hoogvliet (1989): she is exploring the potential of seaweed as a source for sustainable, eco-friendly paint, among other things, a project she started back in 2014.  

Nienke Hoogvliet.

 Where did that idea start?  

"The idea came about after doing some reading and delving further into the negative aspects of regular paint. Workers from textile factories and other industry can get sick from the chemicals used. I realised how crazy it is that I had never wondered before if consumers, and therefore me, could not get sick from the same paint. Or maybe it was? So yes: Greenpeace did some very good research on that.

Many clothes contain far too high a percentage of chemicals. You wear these all day on your skin, which has an absorbent capacity. From there, I started thinking: could I develop more natural paint, or, even more exciting: could you also add something positive to clothes, such as paint made from herbs that could promote your health?"   

'I make the most of seaweed by extracting the colour for paint and making dishes from other residual material'.

 And? 

"It's more complicated than I thought, but constituents from herbs can definitely be transferred into clothes, for example. Only you can't derive medical claims from them without having extensive research done. That is far too costly and complicated for me as an independent designer. Of course, we are also only talking about very low concentrations, but for me it is more important that such a project can make others think about what they all mindlessly buy in shops." 

You do call yourself an 'artivist'. To 'contribute to a more holistic world', you designed chairs with fish skin seats and work with seaweed, among other things. Where does this idealism come from?  

"I had that as a child. When I was seven, I became a vegetarian, even though my parents were not. I stopped doing that again, by the way, after I was found to have a severe B12 deficiency. I also collected signatures against animal testing. I was mainly fascinated by animal suffering, environmental concerns came later. Where exactly that came from, I don't know. In my youth, my parents did have a period when we had to use bath water to flush the toilet, but they were not real activists.

My father is an idealist, but more in the social housing sector in which he worked. My mother is an animal lover and has always been very creative: she carpets cupboards herself, sews clothes herself. I too was behind the sewing machine with her at an early age. I sometimes think: I have my father's head and my mother's hands. A fine combination." 

Chair with fish skin seats.

Hoogvliet's studio on Goudenregenstraat, where she works with four trainees, is somewhere between a gallery and a laboratory. In the shop window are sustainable bowls she designed herself.

On a wall unit, among some prototypes of her 'fish leather', there are also two carcasses. They are both from chickens, one strikingly much larger than the other. "That smallest one is from an organic chicken," Hoogvliet points to the skeleton, which is clearly much weaker developed than that of the free-range chicken next to it. "You would think that the larger chicken was heavier. It wasn't: the organic chicken had much more meat on its smaller body. So you see how they are raised, even in just six weeks." 

 You went to the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Not exactly a place for a sustainable entrepreneur.  

"Right at art school, I discovered that you can use art to tell a story. Exactly what I wanted. It's important to me that my work has an impact. That it is not only in a museum, but that people can also buy it. That way, I hope my work can contribute to more harmony between people and the environment.

That we all start to realise that we need to start consuming in a different way: more consciously. Buying less, using things for longer, and using better raw materials. With my design studio, I try to approach this from different angles: from the consumer, industry or sometimes even a government." 

What were you going to do after art school?  

"The first work I made after I graduated was called 'Sea Me', and it's about the water pollution in the sea with plastic. I wanted to link a positive story to that, and so I started looking at what material can be extracted from the sea that actually produces something very sustainable, that can open our eyes to the beauty and potential of the sea as a source of sustainable materials. That's how I ended up with seaweed yarn." 

Seaweed yarn?  

"Wire, made from seaweed, yes. That already existed in Belgium, where there was one supplier. I had used it for a rug, because I thought it was such a special and sustainable material. After I showed that in 2014 at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, I was flooded by designers who also wanted to work with that yarn. I went back to that supplier, but it turned out to be a one-off experiment that no one had shown interest in.

\Then I decided to make it myself. I immediately broadened that project: I wanted to make the most of the seaweed by extracting the colour for paint and making bowls from other residual material. One residual material had to become the raw material for the next design, so that I would end up with no waste at all." 

For Dutch Design Week 2018, Hoogvliet designed 'Kaumera Kimono'. Kaumera,a raw material from residual and waste water, treated them with two other residues red Anammox bacteria and blue vivianite.

You shrug at nothing: you made bowls out of used toilet paper. Tasty then.   

"That was an assignment from water boards. If I could extract raw materials from seawater, maybe the same could be done with wastewater, was the idea. We started investigating that. Fine screening plants were installed at two locations that filtered fibres from used toilet paper out of wastewater. With light and heat, you can process these into hygienic paper pulp from which you can make anything like papier-mâché. I must admit that I didn't find the idea very fresh myself; at first, I handled the supplied pellets with gloves. But it doesn't smell and it really isn't dirty.

The question, of course, was how to sell this idea to consumers, literally and figuratively. So I decided to use it to make stuff for a kind of living room of the future: a big table with lamps, and bowls, for sale in the studio. At the presentation, no one felt any hesitation in touching it. I have since sold quite a lot of it, too."   

When Hoogvliet learned from a porcelain expert that bones from animals raised in the industry today are too poor to make good quality porcelain, it was the impetus for the Bar Bones project, in which Hoogvliet compares animal bones from organically raised animals and those from the bio-industry.

Are there any other applications with raw materials from water? 

"In Friesland, there is a cycle path where those paper grains have been used, as cellulose that holds the pebbles in asphalt in place, so to speak. You can also make insulation material from it. And, of course, paper or cardboard again. What I find insanely interesting is bioplastic. Water is purified with bacteria. One of those bacteria makes a fatty acid, and bioplastic can be made from that. If you throw it into nature, it is food for the earth and decays. As a material, it has all the characteristics of plastic.

A first pilot plant has now opened in Dordrecht. Bioplastic can be used as foil in agriculture, for example. There, they currently still use those big pieces of real plastic, with all the pollution caused by microplastics. Wouldn't it be great if we could replace that with bioplastic?" 

Do you feel more artist or researcher?  

"Developing seaweed yarn has a lot to do with chemistry. I know nothing about that; before I dropped that subject in high school, it was my only failing grade. But that knowledge can be hired. I feel like an artist first and foremost, akin to design agencies like Atelier NL and Forma Fantasma. I want to be the one who creates a spark and then transfers ideas to others who have the knowledge and enough business acumen to develop it out, keeping the fire burning." 

Your work hung at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, you hung in New York and Japan and were nominated for international awards. Yet you are not a Hague celebrity. How can that be?  

"Good question. I have no idea. A pity, though, because I would like to have more of a connection with the city. To my mind, the creative sector is less alive here, many designers are in Eindhoven or Rotterdam. That's nothing for me. When I studied in Rotterdam, I lived in Delft. I missed the beach and the sea there. That feeling of freedom, that space - I really need that for my creativity. I go to the beach as often as possible. Two steps in the sand and the ideas bubble up. That is also where it all started: over ten years ago, I saw all that plastic lying at the waterline.

I thought: if this is on the beach, how much plastic is in the sea? With that realisation and the question of what I could do with it, my whole work began. Here at the end of the Goudenregenstraat I'm fairly close to it, but one day I hope to live even closer to the beach and dunes, with a big barn as a studio." 

www.nienkehoogvliet.nl