In 2018, the idiosyncratic East London-based multimedia artist and designer Bethan Laura Wood, who once made giant hand-painted polystyrene fruit for Hermès’s windows and designed toothpaste-like hardware for a collection of Valextra bags, was asked by the Champagne maker Perrier-Jouët to participate in its artisan program. Among the pieces she produced was a tree sculpture with anodized aluminum branches in bespoke hues and flowers made of hand-dyed PVC, the material used for commercial garage-door flaps. After that project, Wood, now 38, whose explosively colorful aesthetic is also reflected in her matryoshka-doll-on-acid fashion sense (layers of patterned textiles, drolly sketched eyebrows and a Twiggyesque bob in tangerine or baby blue), continued to play with polychromatic metal and plastic techniques, and she ended up creating this chandelier. Resembling panicles of wisteria, the fixture features both down and up spotlights for traditional illumination, as well as a constellation of LEDs embedded in the limbs, allowing the blossoms, which can be custom tinted, to cast rainbow shadows everywhere. “People step into the room when it’s on,” says Wood, “and suddenly they discover that they’re part of the disco.”
Nilufar wisteria chandelier with three branches, price on request, nilufar.com.
