Indigenous Arctic Fish Skin Heritage: Sustainability, Craft and Material Innovation

Congratulations to Elisa Palomino from UAL, who's PhD thesis was submitted February 2022.

The work covers a wide range of subjects related to the use of fish skin, with an appendix dedicated to the work Elisa did while being a researcher in our FISHSkin EU Horizon 2020-MSCA-RISE project; see page 473.

Link to Elisa Palomino's PhD

Open access peer reviewed articles, by and with FISHSkin researchers

Elisa Palomin (UAL), Katrin Káradóttir (IUA), Lotta Rhame, Joseph Boon

Indigenous Arctic Fish skin clothing traditions: Cultural and ecological impacts on Fashion Higher Education

Published in: Around the Campfire – Resilience and Intelligence, Cumulus Conference Rovaniemi.

Elisa Palomin (UAL), Joseph Boon

Preservation of the Hezhen people’s fish skin tradition through fashion education

Published in: Textiles, Identity and Innovation: In TouchProceedings of the 2nd International Textile Design Conference (D_TEX 2019), June 10, 2020.

Elisa Palomino (UAL), Gustavo Defeo (ArsT)

Material Design Innovation: Fish Leather, a new environmentally friendly material

Published in: 'Design Research for Change' (DR4C) symposium at the Design Museum, London, UK.

Elisa Palomin (UAL), Katrin Káradóttir (IUA), Edwin Phiri (UAL)

Indigenous Fish Skin Craft Revived Through Contemporary Fashion

Published in: International Foundation of Fashion Technologies Institutes. IFFTI conference. Kent, Ohio USA.

Elisa Palomin (UAL), Katrin Káradóttir (IUA)

The case of Fish skin, a historical material assimilated as an innovative sustainable material for fashion

Published in: In Fashion: Culture, Commerce, Craft, and Identity.

Traditional techniques applied to fish skin: persimmon and katazome indigo dyeing

Location: Japan

Researcher Elisa Palomino carried on her studies on Indigo dyeing and persimmon dyeing at the Fujino mountains with indigo master Takayuki Ishii. She tried several indigo dying techniques and learnt how to create her own mulberry paper stencils. Elisa used both her newly created stencils and her vintage katazome stencils to print the glutinous rice resist paste by dipping into Takayuki Ishii’s indigo vats. He taught Elisa the whole sukumo indigo process with indigo plants cultivated in his own plot nearby.

These experiments demonstrated the suitability of the shibori dyeing technique and traditional persimmon dyeing with the juice of green persimmons on the fish skins. While the pine smoke dyeing made the fish skins too stiff, and therefore is not recommended as a natural dying alternative for fish skins.