By Sara Moriano

Five adventurous designers and artists developed creative light fixtures with new technologies, blending sculpture and illumination, in equal measure, forms and concepts that a decade ago would be impossible.

The result is a proliferation of luminous one-off and limited-edition objects that serve as a room’s centerpiece, even as they bathe a space in light.

John Procario

John Procario trained as a fine artist, but when he’s making his wildly sinuous wooden lamps he also needs to rely upon the strength of an athlete.

Based in Cold Spring, New York, Procario began pushing his woodworking skills to the extreme while studying sculpture at SUNY Purchase College, he was pointing out that bones and muscles, like lumber, are flexible until they reach their breaking points.

Three years ago, he translated that concept to LED-based pieces that he calls “free-form lighting sculptures,” which are sold by Worrell Smith Gallery, in Westport, Connecticut. Lamps appear to sprout from tabletops with as much malleability as fabric ribbons, splitting open to reveal lines of light, while pendants capture a sense of movement frozen in midair.

Charlotte Cornaton

Charlotte Cornaton’s home base is Paris, where she’s represented by Galerie BSL, but she considers the world her studio. whose primary focus is ceramics.

Her latest voyage took her to Jingdezhen, China, the historic center of porcelain production, for a two-month residency during which she developed a series of incredibly delicate — and illuminated — ceramic books. With rippling pages, the books present drawings and text inspired by Cornaton’s nightmares, interpreted via the writings of Carl Jung.

Cornaton employed three traditional Chinese porcelain techniques that she learned on location – engraving with celadon glaze, cobalt calligraphy and cloisonné enamel — to adorn the pages with French text and images including horses, volcanoes and serpents. Collectively named Insomnio, the finished pieces are presented on patinated steel stands lit by hidden LEDs, which give each piece a ghostly glow.

Bec Brittain

The faceted SHY Light, Bec Brittain’s now almost-iconic chandelier, uses thin LED tubes to carve three-dimensional volumes out of thin air. For the Brooklyn-based designer, shaping form and space comes naturally.

Brittain’s initial passion for metalwork came from an early job at the upscale door-hardware company H. Theophile, in New York. From there, she added light to the mix while serving as design director at Lindsey Adelman‘s studio.

See more artist at Artists & Creators here.

Since going out on her own in 2011, Brittain has become best known for suspended lamps with striking crystalline forms, which she sells through The Future Perfect. Her Maxhedron fixture has a gem-like shape created with pieces of one-way mirror that only reveal the interior when the light is turned on, while her Echo pendants alternate LED tubes and triangular pieces of colored glass or mirror to multiply and refract light.

Thaddeus Wolfe

It’s fitting that Thaddeus Wolfe grew up in Toledo, Ohio, which is known as the Glass City because of its history of glass innovation and industry. After initially enrolling in the painting program at the Cleveland Institute of Art, he says he “ended up taking an elective course in glass and getting really, really into it.”

More than 15 years later, Wolfe, now based in Brooklyn, is among the most provocative American artists working in the medium, regularly experimenting with processes and techniques to give glass dramatic new forms, finishes and textures.

Each one of Wolfe’s creations, available through New York’s R & Company, is one-of-a-kind, by necessity. To produce his craggy glass pieces, which resemble stalagmites or chiseled blocks of coal, he creates the initial form in Styrofoam or wax, makes a plaster mold and blows in molten glass — a process that destroys the mold every time. He then works the resulting piece by hand, selectively grinding and polishing the rough outer layer to reveal lustrous colored glass inside. Adding light to the equation makes his creations that much more dramatic.

Niamh Barry

Dublin’s Niamh Barry started her career building a wide variety of custom light fixtures to the specifications of interior designers and architects.

Harnessing her creative impulses, she developed a series of large-scale “light sculptures” made from interlocking, irregularly shaped bronze or stainless-steel hoops lined with LEDs behind opal glass diffusers.

After translating her drawings to digital files, she cuts the individual metal pieces (which can number 40 to 50 components for a single work) by water jet, and then welds them together and finishes each piece by hand. Recently, Barry has been experimenting with more jagged, rectilinear forms, which she says “feel far more masculine, dynamic and even aggressive.” Along the way, she is attracting an impressive range of high-profile clients, including Peter Marino, Kelly Hoppen and Sylvester Stallone.

Source:: http://designgallerist.com/blog/lighting-designers-the-next-generation-of-technology-design/