Deborah Thomas "Forest Breeze" Wall Lights

Simply the COOLEST pair of wall sconces I have ever seen. Rare, British, unique, punk, fantastic, sustainable - everything I love about design is found in these lights. Priced individually, though I would love to keep these together and sell as a pair. Deborah's work can be found at the V&A Museum in London and is rarely found on the market.

Broken glass, tinted glass, and steel wire
Model created in 1995
16.5 x 13 x 5 inches (42 x 33 x 12.5 cm), Halogen lamps.

ARTIST: Deborah Thomas (b.1956) "Working with broken glass fragments held an instant attraction for me. The fragments seemed to me to be a lost material, discarded and unusable in that form. I was interested in exploring how I could use the broken glass in a way which might transcend its origins but still retain a sense of punk-inspired anarchy…Each work consists of broken glass fragments sourced from glass bottles or domestic glass objects. The bottles are first carefully cracked and broken into large fragments. From this starting point, smaller fragments are individually tapped into the required shapes using a small metal hammer. Retaining the fragmented quality to the glass pieces during this controlled process is important and became a skill in itself."

These are truly collectible works of contemporary design. an example of an important trend in British design in the 1980s of reusing and recycling materials to create modern, ethically responsible objects - ‘Skip Culture’, as it became known - was perhaps most famously embodied in the work of Ron Arad and of Creative Salvage (the collective of Tom Dixon, Mark Brazier Jones, Nick Jones and later Andre Dubreuil). As the Creative Salvage manifesto of 1983 stated, ‘The key to Creative Salvage’s success does not lie in the expensive research and development costs of modern-day products but in the recycling of scrap to form stylish and functional artifacts for home and office.’