In the first days of May 2022 we opened the workshop and left it open for three evenings. No ribbon, no printed programme, no list of things to say. We carried the finished lamps down from the benches, set them among the tools that made them, and switched them on at dusk. We called the evenings Presence, because after a week of arguing about the name it was the only word none of us wanted to change.

The room as we found it

The building at the back of the courtyard holds our benches, our copper, our dust. It has never been a show room, and we decided not to pretend otherwise. So we left the marks: the stain where a patina bath went over in the cold months, the shelf of half-finished shades nobody has the heart to scrap. Light behaves differently in a room that is still working. It has something to fall against.

We hung the pieces low. Near the floor, near the walls, near the corners people usually cut across. A lamp you meet at shoulder height asks something of you that a lamp on a plinth never does.

What we set out

• Every piece switched by hand, one at a time, by the person who made it.
• No prices on the walls. Only a card with the maker's name and the month the piece left the bench.
• Doors open from six until the last guest went home, all three evenings.

Three evenings, and what came back

More people came than we expected, and they came slowly. Some stayed twenty minutes. One couple stayed until the street lights outside had gone pale and useless, and left having said almost nothing to us, which we counted as the highest praise available. Architects arrived with their hands in their pockets and their eyes on the ceiling. Students asked what the copper is soaked in, and were not satisfied with the honest answer. A visitor who owns a small wall piece of ours brought a photograph of it at home, sun-faded along one edge, and said she preferred it that way. So did we.

"You can still see where the hand hesitated. That is the part I keep looking at."

— a guest, second evening

What we learned is small and useful. People want to stand close. They want the seam, the file mark, the place where a surface turns from bright to soft. And they stay longest when nobody is explaining the piece to them.

Presence will happen again, in another month and probably another room. The lamps have gone back upstairs: some to be finished, some to be corrected, one to be started over. The courtyard is quiet now.

The light stayed.