A Lamp Inspired By The Infamous Iceland Volcano
The Swedish ceramicist Mia Göransson evokes the threat of nature with a switch shaped like an ash cloud.
Meet Eyjafjallajokull. If that crazy name looks familiar, that's because it's also the name of the Icelandic volcano that erupted last May, spewing ash into the sky (and inconveniencing scores of air travelers in Western Europe). The event moved Mia Göransson to design this lamp -- consisting of an oversize "bulb" counterbalanced by a nebulous mass, an evocation of Eyjafjallajokull's cloud of ash.
The light is the Swedish ceramicist's first foray into product design and one of four items from the Fifty Fifty Projects, a collective founded by Katja Pettersson (formerly of design supergroup Front) and so named because it splits the profits 50/50 with the designer. Eyjafjallajokull is a continuation of what Göransson calls her "new nature" theme, in which she borrows forms from nature, such as twigs, leaves, and moss and juxtaposes them against unnatural, strictly geometrical forms.
"My work, a kind of depiction of nature, has increasingly come to be characterized by anxiety and threat," the artist writes on the Fifty Fifty Projects? website. "When I made the model of what has come to evolve into a lamp, ashes from the volcanic eruption in Iceland dominated the news and that made an impression in my design. It was the air, the oxygen in the bubble, the pure form versus the organic unidentifiable smoky and a bit uneasy derivative of a geometric shape, the base." For more examples of her work, go here.
