UC96

This time, two threads came together. The first was wood shavings — the offcuts from working with reclaimed beams, already repurposed once as a structural and aesthetic ingredient in AMBER's organic mortar. The second was a long-standing curiosity about lighting, and specifically about whether a translucent surface could carry warmth and material presence without resorting to conventional solutions.

The answer was fibreglass — a shell built by hand, with wood shavings embedded as both structural reinforcement and visual texture. The same material logic as the mortar, expressed differently: not as a coating but as a skin, continuous and translucent, where the shavings are visible as shadows and layers beneath the surface. Getting there with the skills and materials available at the time was not straightforward. That is part of why the result was satisfying.

The shade has a gently anatomical oval form — a rounded projection at its centre that, once mounted, gives the piece a quietly sculptural presence on the wall. The raw edge of the fibreglass laminate was left unfinished deliberately: the broken shadow it casts against the wall was too good to sand away.

The wall mount is carved from Béjar walnut — a simple wooden arm that anchors to the wall, houses the bulb, and receives the fibreglass shade through a disc of the same wood. Robust, considered, and beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when every decision has a reason.