Dominic Grasso, Arco Lamp (ART & OBJECTS 2025)

Photos:

Andrew Cockerill

Country

Australia

This piece is called the "Arco" Lamp, or "Archer" named after my incredibly beautiful and supportive wife Carmen, who in her youth was a champion archer and was the inspiration for this piece. The purpose of this piece is to create a simple, timeless lighting piece that any person could afford bringing bespoke furniture to any home. This piece was the fourth project I made during the Professional Course in Furniture Design, Making and Restoration at Chippendale, whilst I designed this piece many months in advance, I did not start making this piece with less than two weeks before our graduation exhibition. The intention of this design was to blend simple elegant design with repeatability and rapid batch production methods, I estimate that all in this piece takes 3-4 days to produce (including drying time of glue-ups). I achieved this tight timeframe by implementing one former to perform all processes including the bent lamination to create the curve (using 19 layers of 1.4mm European Oak constructional veneer), to mark out all joinery on the lamp and to cut the lamp to final length. Additionally, rather than making my own lampshade, I reached out to Ayus Design to provide the 3D printed lampshade for this piece. The reasons for this was very simple, I wanted a lampshade to be made from natural products that could eventually be biodegradable and to reduce the use of plastic (including single use plastics in design). I found this lampshade that is made from processed sugar cane that crates raw material or strands of polylactic acid that is then 3D printed into the shape of the lampshade.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.