Today I finished work on the large gilded curly lightshade for Charlie Whinney. The 50 steam-bent wooden coils were stretched over a spherical framework and pinned in place using cocktail sticks as miniature dowels. My instructions on placing the coils were that they should be “consciously random” and cover the frame to make a dense surface.
As the work progressed and the space filled up it got harder and harder to find a place to pin the coils on and the shade developed a beautiful texture. The finished shade has over 100m of steam bent ash and measures 1.25m in diameter.
