The shoes on Björk's latest album cover are made of CO2: Here's the story behind them

Just a few weeks ago, Björk released her tenth studio album, Fossora. Offering lush, poetic and suitably experimental sounds, the album explores concepts of hope, motherhood and earthly fungal life. "Each album always starts with a feeling that I try to shape into a sound," Bjork notes, "and this time the feeling was landing on earth and digging my feet into the ground." Just as entrancing as the Icelandic musician's new sounds is the album cover itself, with imagery so out of this world that it could be confused with animation or CGI.

The cover, shot by Vidar Logi, is the result of a shared vision between Björk and her long-time co-creative director, the British-born and Reykjavik-based visionary James Merry. There's a lot going on: weird and wonderful mushroom growths, a teal ensemble that extends to the fingertips and toes, and an alienesque necklace that mirrors Björk's ethereal hair. But the eye can't help but be drawn to her shoes - and there's quite a story behind them.

Merry, who is also responsible for the intricately sculptural masks often worn by Björk, made his foray into footwear with this particular shoe. The pair are dubbed 'Völubein' after an Icelandic word for a small bone in the ankle, and inspired by Celtic patten shoes from the middle ages that he discovered in an Irish museum several years ago. In his own words, the towering shoes are “more ceremonial than practical”, taking an otherworldly fossilised form, with undulating 3D-sculpted foundations that swirl like solidified ink blots. Atop Björk’s Völubein shoes (a size 38, for those curious) are glinting silver botanical fronts. Sculpted by Merry, the shape is modelled on the tunglurt, a member of the fern family that grows in his own garden just outside the Icelandic capital.

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The shoes are entirely crafted from locally-sourced materials, including the birch wood of the base (in a nice tie-in, Merry tells me that Björk means birch in Icelandic). Put the shoes in the ground and they would decompose – the wood is simply soaked in charcoal ink for the black finish and polished with beeswax for a touch of gloss. The most notable detail, however, are two small eggs, shaped by artist Matthías Rúnar Sigurdsson, which sit cradled within the heel of each shoe. While they could be mistaken for simple granite or volcanic rock, the eggs are, in fact, a scientific breakthrough: stone infused with calcified carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere. Talk about well-heeled.

The revolutionary rock sample comes courtesy of Carbfix, an Icelandic company pioneering new technologies to tackle the climate crisis. Merry approached the team at Carbfix’s Hellisheiði power plant, which is so close to his home that he “can smell the geothermal activity when the wind is blowing in the right direction”. Dr. Edda Sif Pind Aradóttir, CEO of Carbfix, adeptly breaks down the process in simple terminology: “We turn CO2 into stone underground in less than two years. The carbon captured from the atmosphere is dissolved in water, and this sparkling water is injected deep into the subsurface - where the carbon links up with the metals in the bedrock.

“This process is part of the global carbon cycle and is actually nature’s way of regulating long-term CO2 levels in the atmosphere - that is, before humans came and disturbed the natural balance.” According to Aradóttir, this permanent carbon storage solution has potential to be effectively scaled up globally, owing to the abundance of basalt rock across the world, especially across most ocean floors. Merry speaks for us all when he comments, “It’s so sci-fi, what they’re doing, you can hardly believe it works.”

Related: All the times Björk graced our cinema and TV screens (including those times you didn’t even notice)

While the shoes are a little different to Carbix’s usual roster of projects, Aradóttier speaks of the importance of getting the message out to the general public about their solution, “so they can apply pressure on politicians, industries, big companies, anything helps.” She also acknowledges the likeness between Bjork’s artistry and their own efforts. ”Björk is continually reinventing herself, trying new things, always pushing the limit of how far she can go. It is reflected in what we are doing, but instead we are doing it with technology to fight climate change.”

When asked about Iceland’s generally advanced position with climate technologies, Aradóttir humbly puts it down to the nation doing whatever they can to help. “We can’t do the same as the Amazon forest can do with planting trees,” she says, “however, we do have a lot of rocks.”

In an artistic parallel, Björk also plummets below the Earth’s surface for the Fossora album cover. Balancing on the CO2-infused Völubein shoes, Björk was perched on top of a huge set of almost two metres high and eight metres wide, crafted to depict the underworld with weird root systems and thousands of mushrooms – both real and sculpted – by Irma Studio. “It was a scary moment when she got up there. Then we just let her go and she was, like, dancing around. If anyone can walk in shoes like that it is Björk,” says Irma Studio’s co-founder Heimir Sverrisson.

Irma Studio is another discovery amongst the tightly knitted network of genius minds – of both the creative and scientific sort – that collaborated with Merry on the Völubein shoe. The studio, led by Sverrisson and his co-founder Arnar Orri Bjarnasson, is a Reykjavik institution with a jack-of-all trades production team delivering on the wildest of briefs.

Discussing Sverrisson’s work, Merry says: “He’s one of these kind of genius guys that you can go to with anything that you want to make in the world, and in three days he’ll be like ‘Oh yeah, I’ve figured out a way.” Sverrisson’s take? “There is one rule here,” he says. “We say, ‘Yes, we can do it’ and then figure out how to afterwards.” This rule came into play for the Völubein shoes, with their carpenter David Schlechtremen steering the intensive programming of a futuristic five-axis carving machine to bring the sculptural base of the shoes to life, before finishing them painstakingly by hand.

Related: “I’ve just been in my own little bubble with Björk”: Meet the creative right-hand man of the Icelandic icon

The team at Irma Studio are well acquainted with Björk’s whims and eccentricities, with Sverrisson responsible for the renovation of her home, also made of Icelandic birch (not to mention the installation of a whale bone staircase balustrade). He’s also the man behind the sets and props for Björk’s various albums and tours, including her dazzlingly theatrical Cornucopia production. “Things always take a crazy turn. Like for Utopia, we were sculpting all kinds of strange flowers. I sent her a photo of an orchid we had created and she said to me, ‘Can you bring it home to my house?’ So I took it and she held it to her chest and said ‘This is a dress! We can make a dress out of this!’ And James was there and said, ‘Let’s do it!’ and that’s the reason why she has this orchid dress in the Utopia video,” Sverisson recounts.

There’s certainly something in the water, or basalt, in Iceland. To be disruptive and bold is hardwired into Björk’s legendary cultural status, but it’s clearly also a mindset that resonates in her home of Iceland and inspires her dedicated legion of collaborators – intersecting art, technology and innovation. In the words of Sverrisson: “When Björk calls, we drop everything and go with her on some crazy adventures. It is impossible to say no to her.”