Cutting Room Floor

By Rosie Licence

Laser Cut Steel Lamp stitched into structure with Leather Offcuts.

The genesis of this design was a desire to find a use for the odd-shaped leather offcuts from my workplace. With these odd, organic shapes as my starting point, I opted to offset them with a cold, industrial, planar material: stainless steel sheet metal. I felt that these materials balanced each other out in that the leather gave it a sense of natural warmth and texture, while the steel - industrial and clean cut with laser precision, warded off the stereotype that material reuse can make a design look too 'crafty' or 'amateur'. The various methods used to make the lamp reflected this contrast. While the steel was laser cut according to the CAD file I designed, the leather was hand cut with a blade and stitched with a needle. This marrying of industrial manufacturing methods with more manual ones yielded an interesting visual outcome

While I didn't consciously look for inspiration for this piece, and the vision for the piece became clear as soon as I saw the placemats piled at After’s warehouse, it goes without saying that the form would have taken subconscious influence from the following iconic, enduring lamp designs of the 20th century: Tobia Scarpa's Fantasma Lamp, Achille Castiglioni's Arc Lamp and Isamu Noguchi's Akari lamps.

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