Project 2 Studio 2011 - Upcycled Utility / Pendant Light

Cutting diagram 1:5

The main concept of this lamp is actually to simply celebrating the characteristic of the material itself and to play with shades/shadows. One of the best characteristics of this material is that it won’t tear easily. I have been playing with that characteristic to create a lamp that looks hard to make with paper because paper could easily tear apart. Synthetic paper is nice because it has similar characteristic with paper and plastic at the same time.

The shape of the light looks heavy and complicated, but delicate at the same time. The layers are contradicting with each other as it is facing different side, but yet it is successfully gathered in one harmony. These ‘contradicting’ layers also create nice shade as the light managed to get out of the lamp through this space. And when the light is on, not only the shades come out but the colour from the poster on the back also peek out and thus creating a very nice colour and shades. I put the light bulb at the centre so that the light could be distributed to the whole lamp. It’s also nice to see that in several spots when it is near the light source, the material begins to show it’s transparency .

I’ve avoided folding techniques in the making process because the material is pretty thick thus it’s hard to fold and hard to make a crisp line. I decided to use cutting or slicing techniques and tried to produce a lamp with waste as minimum as possible and with less part so it is easy to assemble and to flat pack. I arrived at making this lamp with only 1 flat piece of paper joined by nuts and bolts.

The particular poster (Cowboys & Aliens) was chosen because I found it beautiful as it has nice colour gradation throughout the whole poster. I managed to capture the beauty of the colour in my lamp, which consequently has 2 major colours like the poster, blue and brown. These colours blend well as each colour is complement to each other and one colour is not stronger than the other. Those 2 colours are also in balance as they have the same level of gradation, which is captured beautifully when the light is on.