Quilt of Many Colours, by Andrea Liu. 2020. Photograph by Emma Booth.

Meet the Artful Craft exhibitor, artist, and designer turning discarded salmon skins into leather.

By Imogen Hayes

29 June, 2022

Fish skin leather has a history that spans several cultures, once integral to indigenous communities in coastal and riverine areas across the globe. The Ainu of Japan, the Hezhen of northeastern China, the Nivkh of Siberia, the Inuit of northern Canada, and several peoples indigenous to Alaska, including the Alutiiq, Athabascan, and Yup’ik, incorporated fish skin leather into their clothing, shoes and containers, favouring its strength and water-resistant properties. However, this traditional practice faded into obscurity in the 20th Century. In some communities, fish skin came to be regarded as a ‘poor man’s leather’, because it was perceived that fish could be caught by unskilled hunters, while the violence of colonialism saw the near eradication of indigenous cultural practices in Canada and the US. But now, fish skin leather is undergoing a revival as indigenous communities strive to unearth the traditional practices of their ancestors, and a new generation of designers seeks out ecologically viable alternatives to cow leather production.

Woven tiles, naturally dyed, by Andrea Liu. Photograph by Emma Booth.

Nominated by Peter Randall-Page for the Artful Craft exhibition, Andrea Liu turns salmon skins, salvaged from the bins of smokeries, restaurants, factories and fishermen, into leather artworks. Utilising her specialism in woven textile design, which she developed during her undergraduate degree at Central St. Martins, she weaves the salmon skins in intricate patterns that stand alone as one-off pieces, or are hand sewn into quilts. Andrea is currently studying MA Textiles at the Royal College of Art, where she continues to hone and explore her craft, and interrogates her role as a designer in advocating for green practices in the textile industry.

According to Hakai Magazine, every tonne of filleted fish amounts to approximately 40 kilograms of skins, which are then ground into animal feed or fertiliser, discarded in landfills, or thrown back into the sea. Humans consumed the fillets of just under 150 million tonnes of fish globally in 2015, which equates to approximately six million tonnes of skins.

Andrea turns waste skins into material of value. By adopting traditional practices of dyeing, tanning, spinning and weaving, her process is totally free of chemicals. She achieves beautiful colours in her work using natural dyes she has made herself, from experiments with kitchen waste and lichen, as well as other natural pigments. Though processing waste produces waste of its own, Andrea is determined that nothing goes to landfill, and hand sews her offcuts into vibrant Zero-Waste Patchwork pieces.

Andrea’s craft is as much a preservation of cultural stories and practices as it is of the salmon skin itself. Her work is infused with the knowledge and stories told to her by those who have guided her in honing her practice. Native Alaskan methods inform her leatherising and tanning, while her off-loom woven quilts incorporate colloquial Guernsey patterns. Her work reacquaints us with forgotten practices and narratives, and asks us to reevaluate the stories that, like the salmon skins themselves, are all too often discarded.

I spoke to Andrea to learn more about what drew her to the practice of leatherising salmon skins.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

How did your fascination with salmon skin leather begin?

So it started in my second year at Central Saint Martins when I was sent to a cluster of old factories in Hackney Wick with some other students. One of the buildings was a smokery for smoked salmon. For some reason, my peers at that time weren't interested in that factory so, being older, I volunteered to go to the smokery. I was invited to have a proper tour of the building, and then I got to talk to the factory owner, and from our conversations I began to ask myself what can I do with this waste? So the owner brought me to these massive bins, and at the factory they produce around 500 skins per week. The salmon skins are so beautiful when you really look at them: the colours, the scales, the patterns, the textures. And the first question that came to mind was how do I leatherise this? How do I preserve this material? It's slimy, you still have the flesh on it. It smells a little bit fishy, of course. From there I started diving into YouTube clips and tanning books. I came across some incredible women working in tanning. One of them is Lotta Rahme. She's really famous in Sweden, and also in the leather world. She's a traditional tanner, and she introduced me to natural veg and oil tanning. From there I started experimenting with this practice and it took me a year to learn, and eventually I signed up for a workshop in Alaska where I met Audrey Armstrong, a wonderful Athabaskan woman who makes beautiful baskets out of fish skins, usually from fish caught by herself and her husband on the river. She taught me her techniques and shared her stories, and I got to really understand salmon skins in a personal way. And that’s how I just fell in love with salmon.

Is there something that you find really meditative about the process of leatherising salmon skins?

From a design perspective, I think it's really interesting, because when you're in design school, you don't really learn the process of how material is made, and often you become wasteful as a result. But when I started processing the material, getting it from raw, and then leatherising it, I began to realise how much work goes into the processing of the material. I've dislocated my thumb a few times, because it's so laborious. The process I use is very traditional, very ancient. You’re cleaning the skins with your knife, by hand, you're washing it by hand, and then you're softening it by hand, you soften it over a rock and you're really working at it, so your whole body is involved in the processing of this material. So the relationship with the material becomes really intimate, you actually get to know every skin because every skin essentially is alive. Some of the skins are so stubborn, they have their own characteristics. As a result you don't want to throw anything out anymore, and when there are offcuts, you save everything. I think that's where the beginning of a dialogue of sustainability comes in. When you arrive at the final product, you hope you’ve done the salmon justice. I think that ties in with the way indigenous communities value the entirety of the animal. As designers and makers, that's up to us as well, to have that respect for our materials. I’m working with a byproduct, but I’m breathing new life into it.

You’re working with a material with so many irregularities, and yet you achieve these incredibly intricate patterns. How much have you come to embrace those irregularities in your work?

Well, the skins I receive from the smokery aren’t perfect, they wouldn't be acceptable in a tannery. They're waste that nobody wants to use, because they carve into the fish with the skin still on during the smoking process. So I receive these wholly imperfect skins, but I see the beauty of them. I think it's really interesting to work with constraints. The reason I weave them is not just because of my specialism in weave, but also because I was trying to figure out a way to disassemble and reassemble the material, so that I can create something. I cut them into strips, so I can better utilise the whole material. I think with the patchwork pieces, like the quilts, you'll see the holes, you'll see they’ve been mended, and that’s to highlight the imperfection of the skin. With some of the quilts, tiny little holes and imperfections are there for a purpose, so you’ll see that this was a byproduct, and even in imperfection, there's beauty. And because my nature is to strive for perfection, I really enjoy this meshing of intricate patterns in a methodical way. Sometimes you'll see some of the texture of the skins has been worn away, because of the way they've been handled in the factory. They have a bit of fraying on the surface. Then other parts of his skin have preserved these perfect gridlines of where the scales used to be. All these characteristics express the story of what the skins have gone through.

Dreaming of Gansey Patterns, by Andrea Liu. 2020. Photograph by Emma Booth.

You incorporate a lot of different cultural references into your work, with your woven designs inspired by Guernsey patterns, and your tanning methods derived from traditional Native Alaskan practices. Fish skin leather has a long history across so many cultures, and yet has largely faded out of practice. So is that something you’re really concerned with, the preservation of these cultural stories and practices?

I wanted to incorporate stories into my work, and I thought I would love to interview a few retired fishermen who would be willing to speak with me. So Fishermen’s Mission connected me with the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther in Scotland. Then I was also connected with a home for retired fishermen in Hull, and I was able to speak with a group of retired fishermen. They told me their stories about the hardships they went through at sea: the fear of not knowing what would happen next, the fear of death, as well as the relief of coming back home with their family for three days, because that's all they had before they were back at sea for months at a time. I was really inspired by these fishermen's sweaters, because it was wonderful to see how textiles were used as a language. These Guernsey patterns are imbued with so much meaning. Every pattern has a story and symbolises something.

According to some fishermen, in the past, you were able to identify the bodies of the fishermen who lost their lives at sea their sweaters, because they were knitted by these women in specific villages. So you could tell from which village or household the fishermen came from, so bodies could be returned home. Some say it’s a myth, but I would love to believe it’s true!

I’ve incorporated this ‘V’ pattern in my quilts, and that’s what they call a herringbone pattern. It represents fish — they were always hoping to catch a lot of fish, because that amounts to wealth. You’ll also see zigzags, which they would call ‘the ups and downs of marriage’. The diamond shape also represents the heart within the home. It’s fascinating how these colloquialisms are communicated in the knitting patterns. I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to recreate this visual language in some way? Because that's exactly what we're trying to do as makers, to connect with people, otherwise what's the purpose of making? And I loved the challenge of storytelling without words.

You are working to decolonise the practice of making fish skin leather. Can you tell me what that means to you?

It came from my time with Audrey Armstrong, while I was listening to her talk about salmon. Salmon was no longer a fish, it was family. For her it was personal. It was not just her livelihood, it was somebody that she loved, so there was huge respect for the fish. For us coming from a Western education, we were never taught that way. Food comes from the supermarket, it's packed, we don't hunt for meat, we don't fish for salmon. For indigenous communities, there's a huge respect for the animal, as well as how they treat the byproducts of the food. As a result of my time with Audrey I became involved with a wonderful organisation called Salmon Nation, which has connected me with creatives, writers, filmmakers and investors who are working closely as allies with indigenous communities. Audrey encouraged me to teach what I learned, and to be as generous as I can. So my hope is to share these skills eventually, to recreate exchanges of some kind. The history of colonialism is so laden with blood, it's horrendous, what has happened to the indigenous populations in North America, and it’s still only in recent history. A lot of indigenous women like Audrey have to go to museum archives to learn their ancestral practices, to reverse engineer them almost. That's how they learn their culture, because it's been almost eradicated.

Zero-Waste Patchwork by Andrea Liu. Photograph by Emma Booth.

Sustainability is intrinsic to your work, and of course the textile industry is such a big culprit in terms of carbon emissions and the waste it produces. So how do you situate yourself in this dialogue about sustainability in the textile industry, and what do you think can be the role of designers as advocates for positive change?

Designers now are working with so many interesting materials, for example: cow blood, scrap metals, scrap wood, or even with mycelium or bacteria to create pigments. We’re seeing a lot more designers thinking seriously about ecology, and any good designer is concerned with the end of life and end of usage. They’re asking themselves, how does this material have a healthy death? How can we give back life? My work is an investigation into what is a healthy material, so what is healthy tanning? What is healthy dyeing? What are healthy finishings? I also started thinking about what a healthy way of recycling offcuts would be. Because even though the materials are from waste, I'm still creating waste in my work. So from these experiments I want to create something beautiful, because the skin itself is beautiful. I want to preserve this beautiful material and create something long lasting. If we’re considering the life cycle of the material, I think designers hold the key to change for sure.

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