Nicolette de Waart

Nicolette de Waart works where sculpture meets functional object, in a practice built around connection, femininity and beauty. Her Berry Lamps pay homage to the Japanese chochin lantern, an age-old tradition that still works as a delicate, fully realised piece of art. She translates that principle using mainly natural materials, worked entirely by hand: the result is featherlight, in weight too, yet solid as rock.

Her design vocabulary is rooted in nature and shaped by the countries she has lived in — Singapore, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands. Research is not a preliminary stage for her but a method. The Berry Lamps came out of play with paper-kneaded balls, and the recognition within that of the conical, irregular pattern of a blackberry. In nature, imperfection is not a flaw but a character, and De Waart deliberately exaggerates the asymmetry. Each lamp follows no pattern, only intuition, and is therefore unrepeatable.

Her work moves continuously between craftsmanship and innovation, in partnership with foundries and their specialist knowledge of bronze, wood, textile, clay and the lost-wax process.

GROUND showed where a maker's authority comes from. In a space built for habitation, De Waart's work asks a different question: what happens when a light source behaves like an inhabitant rather than an object.

Her Berry Lamps are functional — they light a room the way a lamp should — but their skin, built from hundreds of unequal spheres, refuses the smoothness usually expected of an interior piece. On the sixth floor of NIO House that tension does not sit opposite habitation but inside it: an object that is as much sculpture as fixture, and that only completes itself once light passes through it.