For Milano Design Week 2018, Giopato&Coombes, the Italian-British design duo operating in the lighting sector, presented Supernatural Daydream, a special project based on experimentation on the theme of light and the emotions it generates.
The investigation that ranges through precious materials and high technology, nature and magic, has led to the creation of a series of installations, one-of-a-kind pieces that represent unexpected mutations that emerged during the development and reinterpretation of the catalogue collections.
The fundamental inspiration behind the project is the marvellous Cansiglio Forest in the Veneto and the architectural suggestions that arise from the encounter between trees and vegetation: natural geometric forms that lend themselves to the creation of optical illusions, triggered by majestic size in relation to a wealth of details, and the transformations of the landscape depending on its distance from the observer.
In the research of the designers the forest is extracted from the natural world to become design: four sculptural chandeliers that seem to be suspended in an enigmatic and abstract reality, on which inflorescences, branches and “supernatural” elements grow, crystallised in brass, as in a process of pollination.
The installations are immersed in an environment dominated by red, a colour that suggests Venetian roots but also serves to represent the separation from nature towards a humanised, artificial world, creating a sensation of disorientation in visitors.
Midnight Dew
A “mobile” chandelier, impressive but light, that develops on a structure of brass arms from which light spheres of transparent handcrafted blown glass “blossom”, containing the light sources and suggesting dewdrops lit up in the night. Natural elements in brass colonise the branches of the installation, in a dual decorative and functional guise: besides visually enhancing the installation, they work as counterweights that keep the structure in balance.
Vines & Lichens
A large installation composed of a weave of lines/vines in brass, interrupted by luminous capsules: again in this case, brass mosses and lichens grow on the structure, in a surprising meeting of artificial and natural geometric forms.
Wheat Field
Inspired by off-scale spikes of grain, the chandelier extends in a long suspended brass structure where the luminous bodies are spheres or cylindrical parts. On the ground, the installation is completed by a table with a base in Venetian terrazzo, from which a circular brass top rises on which to place a block of glass with an irregular form (cullet) that becomes a specific lighting object. The raw material of glass, explored by the duo, becomes an element to display in its primal state, in a vision where natural and supernatural swap roles.
Pollination
Cycle The Gioielli collection presented by the duo in 2017 is transformed to take on the appearance of an installation that colonises one corner of the space, where the various parts of the appliques – the “gems” in Murano glass, the brass disks, the spherical lenses containing the light sources – combine and are contaminated by outgrowths of vegetable origin, in brass.
Tribal Rythm
This installation is composed of a brass structure that extends in straight and curved lines, which in a game of full and empty zones encounter simple geometric forms, like the sphere – recurring on the structure and the parts in handcrafted blown glass – and cylindrical volumes for the light sources. Brass vegetable and animal beings alight there, as if suspended in a process of supernatural transformation.
