Ori Orisun Merhav begins not with a form, but with a material. Her fascination with shellac led her to the lac insect, Kerria lacca, whose tiny body transforms the sugars of a tree into a natural polymer. What humans have traditionally treated as a coating, varnish or industrial substance becomes, in Orisun’s hands, a sculptural material with its own history, behaviour and intelligence.
The work develops through a conversation between the properties of the material and the techniques used to shape it. Shellac can be heated, stretched, blown and printed, but it never behaves quite like a conventional industrial medium.
Orisun borrows methods from glassblowing and additive manufacturing while allowing the material to retain its irregularities, translucency and amber depth.
The resulting forms hover between biological and manufactured: cocoons, cells, vessels and architectures that seem to have grown rather than been assembled.
There is a quiet reversal at the centre of Made by Insects. The artist is not inventing a new material for nature, but studying a material already invented by another species. The insect becomes maker, architect and collaborator; Orisun becomes the translator. Her objects therefore occupy an unusual territory between craft, sculpture and industrial design, asking what design might become when its intelligence begins not with human manufacture, but with attention to another form of making.
