Slakkenpoep-linoleum

Lieske Schreuder is a garden and interior designer with an affinity for monuments and historic buildings. She employs a scientific approach to her design practice, resulting in novel combinations of materials.

In 2012, Schreuder noticed that the snails in her garden enjoyed eating paper; they left behind curious patterns in the paper as they ate through it. After feeding them coloured cardboard, Schreuder also discovered that the snails’ faeces retained the paper’s colour. This discovery functioned as the starting point for her research which led to her thesis and graduation project at the University of the Arts Utrecht. Schreuder designed a machine that would grind and process the faeces into threads or tiles, which she named Slakkenpoep-linoleum – snail poop linoleum. Schreuder’s project, though not feasible at scale, pointed to the infinite unused and unnoticed potential materials that humans bypass for wood, stone and plastic every day.