En Foy Prest Light

A sculptural amber-glass table light, and the first object of En Foy Prest. It affects a room before it is touched.

The light began as a pendant: a large blown-glass dome with a cluster of amber forms inside it, somewhere between fruit, chandelier and atmosphere. That drawing got the project into the room. In a factory in Guzhen it met two pieces of amber glass that had something the drawing had been trying to describe: the warmth of fruit without becoming fruit, colour thickening at the edges and opening through the body. The pendant was abandoned on the spot.

The glass did not want to hang. It wanted to sit, among books, drinks, keys and hands, in the life inside a room rather than the architecture of it. So the object became a table light, worked out at a factory table in Zhongshan with the glass, a diary, a phone and tea: rods, bases, tubes, LEDs, openings and moulds, discovered through handling rather than refined from a fixed concept.

The material problem is the emotional problem. The amber has to stay rich without turning murky, the LED warm without turning everything yellow, the metal structural without making the object an appliance. The reference point is Flos’ Snoopy: proof that a lamp can have character without becoming a joke. The first prototype has found a home and a small first run is being prepared; price and date will be announced here first.