Tokyo, 2009. One room, borrowed for a week, and a question we had been carrying for years: what becomes of a lamp when nobody asks it to be repeatable? For this showing we set out the pieces with no series behind them. One-offs, prototypes, drawings that grew a body of their own.

Out of series, into the open

We carried the work outside. Hand-woven aluminium spheres from the Wireform family stood on rough iron stems along the edge of the courtyard, where the evening air could move through the weave. Each sphere holds one small source at its centre, and the light reaches the ground through the gaps in the wire. Shadows draw a second, slower pattern on the stone, and they drift as the metal warms.

Inside, the same thinking at table height. Spheres of woven wire in brass, in silver, in bare aluminium, set low so that visitors looked down into them rather than up. Nothing was for sale and nothing was numbered. We wanted the pieces read as objects first and lamps second, so we lit them as objects: a little light from within, a great deal of dark around.

Some of those forms never went back into the catalogue. A few did, and we still make them. The room emptied, the crates came home, and the drawings stayed on the wall.