In the spring of 2015 we carried a set of wire spheres into a walled garden in Milano, behind an old orangery whose glass had long since gone cloudy. The citrus trees were gone as well. What remained was clipped boxwood, a gravel path, a low brick wall, and the particular quiet of a garden that had outlived its purpose. We were asked for light that would not disturb that quiet — something low, something that could pass for the last of the evening.

Wireform, set among the planting

So we used our Wireform pieces: spheres of hand-woven aluminium wire, each one holding a single small bulb at its centre. Some we set down in the beds on their rough iron bases, half hidden by the boxwood, so that light came up through the leaves and threw a moving grid of shadow across the gravel. Others we hung from the old iron supports of the orangery, at head height and above, where they read as pale fruit against dark glass. Because the weave is open, the light never lands flat. It travels through the wire, breaks, and comes back as pattern — on the path, on the brick, on the faces of anyone walking slowly between.

Outdoor work asks for patience. The spheres stayed out through rain and through the dust of a Milanese summer, and the aluminium took both without complaint. We kept the level deliberately dim, a few degrees above the ambient dark, so the eye still had something left to do. Visitors found the path without being shown it. That was the whole brief, answered.

The garden closes at midnight. The spheres stay where they were, unlit and round, waiting for the next evening. Light, for a while, gave the place back to itself.