Loci Lamp
2022, Copper, Recycled Glass, PLA, Electronics, Twine
Your table’s centerpiece for your shared meals for years to come. These glowing disks of light and reflection will become the loci of your table, the gravitational center of the gathering.
Loci is a lamp composed of suspended CNC-engraved recycled-glass enameled disks that cast interesting and varying shadows, moving with the gathering around them.
Loci is made to be jostled, to sway when touched and the table knocked. To be played with and investigated.
Form Finding
Enamel's interplay of light directly informed the lamp design. Prototypes explored ways of facilitating movement; suspension proved ideal, allowing the energy of a gathering to animate enameled surfaces.
Technical Challenges
Guilloche is a decorative engraving technique historically done on a rose engine lathe — precise, labor-intensive, and largely inaccessible.
Could modern CNC tools recreate the effect?
Using a desktop ShopBot, I engraved close, repetitive vector patterns based on traditional guilloche. The process proved viable, though more specialized equipment would resolve limitations I had to work around manually.
Material Challenges
Traditional enameling uses specialty vitreous enamel powder — but enameling is simply fusing powdered glass to metal with heat.
Could recycled glass work instead?
Rigorous testing confirmed it could, using transparent frit from a captured waste stream.
