Willowlamp partnered up with South Africa’s top platform for collectible design, Southern Guild, to showcase Creative Director, Adam Hoets latest piece – Southern Flame.
From the designers: Part art, part lighting, part mystery, willowlamp’s products conjure a sense of the extraordinary. The same can be said of the design company’s latest creation, a spectacular wall-mounted chandelier entitled Southern Flame. South Africa’s top platform for collectible design, Southern Guild, commissioned willowlamp Creative Director Adam Hoets to create the limited edition piece for its 10th-anniversary showcase, “Extra Ordinary”. Featuring artists and designers from a range of disciplines, this highly curated show runs until 16 April 2018 at Cape Town’s GUILD Gallery.
Southern Guild represents the best in locally made limited-edition design and exhibits locally and internationally, at respected events like Design Days, Collective Design Fair and Design Miami. For “Extra Ordinary”, Southern Guild challenged artist-designers to expand their resources, crossing into other mediums, disciplines, tools and technologies. Hoets seized the opportunity to develop a daring interpretation of a wall sconce that upends the concept of both the traditional chandelier and wall-mounted lighting.
"This piece is primarily a work of art rather than a chandelier or a light installation,” says Hoets. The concept stemmed from a challenge issued by Southern Guild co-founder Julian McGowan. “He challenged me to design a chandelier that totally turned the idea of a chandelier on its head. Something about the idea struck a chord and my mind could not let go of it."
Southern Flame is a monumental piece that draws on a range of artistic influences. These include Surrealism, pure geometry and Mandala motifs, which are found throughout the willowlamp collections. The Mandala includes forms derived from a combination of Islamic patterns and pure geometry, and is a source of inspiration for Hoets.
The result is a complex and multi-faceted wall-mounted design that stretches from floor to ceiling. Southern Flame seems to both rise like a fire, Hoets explains, and "melt down onto the floor like the clocks in Salvador Dali’s Surrealist paintings…I imagined it as a crystalline portal from another dimension."
While the concept is innovative, the materials used in Southern Flame are the same as in willowlamp’s other products. The upper frame is laser-cut stainless steel. Various brass, copper and smoke-coloured ball-chains hang over a hundred suspended LED lamps. The main difference, Hoets says, is the detail. "Each chain had to be precisely located and there were over 10 000 individual pieces of chain."
With its striking blend of colour, warmth and pure geometry, Southern Flame triumphs as a piece of collectible design and is available exclusively through Southern Guild.
Photography by Hayden Phipps
