Made by Insects, Blown Like Glass: How Ori Orisun Merhav Won a Dutch Design Award
Some designers start with a sketch. Ori Orisun Merhav started with a plane ticket to Bangkok and a question about a bug.
That was November 2020. She was 24, and she was going to northern Thailand to meet the lac insect, a tiny creature that lives on tree branches, the Financial Times reported in September 2024. Six years on, that trip has made her a Dutch Design Award winner.
A night at Piet Hein Eek's workshop
On October 17, the Dutch Design Awards named three Emerging Talent winners at a ceremony in the Eindhoven workshop of Piet Hein Eek. Merhav was one of them, alongside Jun Fujisaku and Esmay Wagemans. Each gets €10,000, backed by the Keep an Eye Foundation.
Fifteen designers made the shortlist. The jury, chaired by Borre Akkersdijk, said Merhav has developed "a singular ecological signature". The work of all fifteen finalists is on show at the Strijp TX building during Dutch Design Week, which ends on October 25.
Who she is
Merhav was born in Israel. She graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2022, and her thesis looked at materials as a way of thinking about people and nature. She now works from a studio in Brussels.
The FT found her there in a pair of upstairs rooms in a former textile factory on a canal, shared with a dozen young creatives. She told the paper she missed watching sunsets in Tel Aviv.
Her studio and research platform is called Made by Insects. The name is the brief.
The material, in one sentence
Lac is a deep amber resin that female lac insects (Kerria lacca) secrete as they feed on tree sap, using it to build their cocoons, and once cleaned it becomes shellac, the stuff of furniture varnish and old 78rpm records.
That is as much chemistry as she needs. What caught her in Thailand was not the resin but the insects' manners. She spent a month in the fields talking to farmers. "I was moved by the insects' ability to consume just enough to survive without disrupting the tree's ecosystem," she told Sarah Myerscough Gallery, which represents her.
The harvest itself waits on the insects. Farmers collect the lac only once the young have hatched and crawled out, she wrote in her project notes. It is the leftover of a life cycle.
Three objects worth knowing
The blown lights. Merhav melts shellac and blows it into fine bubbles, the way a glassblower works glass. Clusters of these bubbles bloom into lamps and a trailing chandelier. Each piece takes up to five days, the FT reported. Sarah Myerscough showed them at PAD London in 2024.
Morphogenesis. A 3D-printed shellac vessel. The first piece in the edition was acquired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, according to her gallery.
Morphocatalysis. A sculptural work shown through Sarah Myerscough Gallery. Alongside the hand-blown pieces, she prints with lac too. She launched her first 3D-printed lac objects in 2023, with partners including Ginger Additive.
She is also an associate researcher at the Bio-Polymer Lab in Breda, and she works with lac-harvesting communities in India and Thailand.
Her best work is a conversation, not a product
Here is our view. Merhav's objects matter less as things to own than as things that start a conversation. She says so herself. "I see them as a portal — a way to talk about new ideas," she told the FT.
That honesty is the point. Plenty of material projects promise to replace plastic and never leave the lab. She doesn't promise that. "I'm not interested in replacing synthetic polymers completely," she said, "but in using both biomaterials and man-made ones in their right place."
It's a modest claim, and a better one. A golden lamp made of insect resin will not fix how we make things. But it makes you ask where your materials come from, and who, or what, made them. Most design never gets you that far.
The jury called the winners designers who "refuse predetermined commercial tracks". For Merhav, that reads less like rebellion and more like patience. She waits on an insect with a ten-month life cycle.
What comes after the prize
The prize money buys time, and the shortlist show puts her in front of the industry this week in Eindhoven. In London, her solo show Portal Into the Multi-Species runs at Sarah Myerscough Gallery until November 7. Her work is already in the Jan van Eyck Academie's Future Materials Bank.
She has a big question for what comes next. "What if tiny insects would be our architects?" she asks on her gallery's page. It's a strange idea. After this week, more people will be listening.
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