Nico and His Cousins

Nico and His Cousins is a collection of hand-built sculptural ceramic table lamps that inspires the joy of working with hands through unpacking, assembling and balancing weights.

I like my hands.

My hands are small and yellow. I played the piano growing up and could not wait for them to grow so I could reach that one octave. Now I work with clay and my hands can go through narrow cylinders. My hands are thick. They cannot fit into my mother's elegant leather gloves but can open jars of pickles.

But that's not why I like my hands. It's simply because I can make things that did not exist just a moment ago appear in my life, like breakfasts, drawings, and ragtime tunes. I can make tools to make forms to make lamps to make space to make shows to make friends to give tools to so they can also make things.

Nico and His Cousins is a collection of hand-built ceramic table lamps which come in components that fit right inside the belly of the hand. This makes the shipping easier but also I hope it will make a fun experience to unpack and put the parts together. I want it to be like assembling the small toys I used to find in the bottom of a cereal box. I had great fun taking parts out from the pressed plastic sheets and building small animals or cars on the kitchen table.

I often find basic physics like gravity amusing and like to incorporate it into my designs in a simple yet playful way. The balancing ceramic globes came from this desire.

The owner can easily change the wire components and the number and the color of the globes, to reflect a change of seasons, interior decors or taste. 

2019
Ceramic, steel wire, and electrical components

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