Off the wrack: the designer using seaweed to create art and high fashion

Katrín Þorvaldsdóttir at home. ‘Everyone is focused on seaweed as a food and nothing else.’ Photograph: Sigga Ella/The Guardian

Katrín Þorvaldsdóttir’s Reykjavík home is a temple of seaweed. Looped around her neck as jewellery, mounted on the wall in theatrical masks and embedded in intricately woven high-fashion clothing, it is everywhere.

But other than a light, sweet seaweed scent drifting through her workshops, the material is not immediately obvious. Some of the objects look like leather, others like animal skin or lace. Adorning a jacket on a mannequin, it looks too beautiful to pass as seaweed.