Stepping on snails is nasty — feeling the distinctive crack-and-squelch beneath your foot is all sorts of ugh-ack-yuck-ew. Dutch artist, designer and scientific researcher Lieske Schreuder found a way to make the experience less visceral but arguably more disgusting, by creating tiles composed of terrestrial mollusc turds.
Screuder discovered that the common garden critters happily eat paper, and that they would “recycle” it in exactly the same bright hues it was before being digested. So she set up a little lab to mould these bright, malleable squiggle-dumps into “threads” which are then pressed into modular flooring units and dried in place.
It’s tough to tell the durability or texture of the pieces based on the pics alone, but, assuming they’ll hold up, this is a pretty fascinating use of bizarro natural materials.
The project is currently part of the Biology Design exhibition at the New Institute in Rotterdam, if you’re in the Netherlands and want to see it up close, and Screuder is looking at ways to produce these as a new kind of linoleum. In the meantime, here’s to shiny happy pooping! [Dezeen]