A research project to explore the tactile and expressive qualities of combined materials using the hand braiding technique of Kumihimo. The Light Charmer focuses on the interplay between the mechanical approach to design and the intuitive approach where you can evoke a feeling and emotion. Exploring the duality of these approaches allows access into the potential of materials, colours, functions and forms that lay dormant.
The freedom in hand braiding allows materials to be transformed into objects through measured choices in colour, texture and composition. Braiding can offer a means to create lightness, transparency and movement with interior and exterior volumes.
With no limits to the materials that can be charmed, why not see light as a material? By re-imagining the Japanese lantern, braiding is used as a method to sculpt light through the capturing of light in wooden cages bound with colourful paper chains. By day, the light silently obeys with lifeless sorrow in wooden confinement. Yet under the cover of darkness, the magic elixir runs through its veins. The light undergoes powerful transformation as it twists and turns dancing within confinement escaping the binding grasps to cast a shadow of the cage onto the walls.
The freedom in hand braiding allows materials to be transformed into objects through measured choices in colour, texture and composition. Braiding can offer a means to create lightness, transparency and movement with interior and exterior volumes.
With no limits to the materials that can be charmed, why not see light as a material? By re-imagining the Japanese lantern, braiding is used as a method to sculpt light through the capturing of light in wooden cages bound with colourful paper chains. By day, the light silently obeys with lifeless sorrow in wooden confinement. Yet under the cover of darkness, the magic elixir runs through its veins. The light undergoes powerful transformation as it twists and turns dancing within confinement escaping the binding grasps to cast a shadow of the cage onto the walls.