‘It’s almost like Vaseline’: artists including Antony Gormley swap paint for seaweed ink in art challenge

Caragh Thuring says the smell of the ink evoked her childhood in the west of Scotland. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi

Last year in early summer, Alex Glasgow could be seen hauling up a long string of orangey-black seaweed on to the barge of his water farm, located off the west coast of Scotland near Skye. Growing on the farm was what Glasgow described as “perhaps the quickest-growing biomass on the planet”: seaweed.

The weed from Glasgow’s farm, KelpCrofters, is used in everything from soil fertiliser to artisanal soaps to glass-making and is part of a burgeoning industry – not just in Scotland, but around the world.