Around the table, we gather and exchange—through food, conversation, and the passing of knowledge across generations. This research project is a collaboration between Ori, a designer and material researcher and her mother, a designer, ceramicist and curator. It is a dialogue between human craft and insect labor, bridging tradition and innovation.

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The Kerria lacca insects transform tree sugars into a polymer, constructing cocoons that form a second skin for the tree—an organic architecture of protection and transformation. This natural secretion, long used as a varnish, now finds new purpose as a ceramic glaze, becoming a skin for clay. Unlike traditional glazes, this technique embraces nature’s regenerative cycles, allowing these surfaces to return to the earth, continuing the endless flow of material transformation.

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This work explores how natural materials shift, merge, and evolve across time, process, and generations—an exchange both intimate and expansive, shaped by human hands and the wisdom of insects.