When Kassandra Thatcher and Danny Kaplan met at a shared Long Island City studio space about 10 years ago, they became fast friends.
The pair encouraged each other in the early days of defining their lighting-design practices, and—though Thatcher is now based primarily in LA—they've remained close through the expansions of their evolving studio careers. On the occasion of Kaplan’s new studio and showroom opening in Noho, the friends took the opportunity to work together for the first time. In the process, Thatcher departed from her signature forms in a way she anticipates will now push her work in a new direction.
In some ways, the work Thatcher created is characteristic of her practice, which brings sculptural form into everyday life through organically shaped clay lamps, sconces, and design objects, seeming to capture natural movement at a moment in time. But upon closer inspection, its process and materiality reveal a new direction. “It’s a bit of a departure from my usual work—this is the first time I’ve put out anything into the world that’s not clay,” says Thatcher, “and the shades are really the piece.” Ostensibly, this new commission is a chandelier, but only in that it is affixed to the ceiling, and branches out at its ends. The nearly seven-foot-long work is made up of a large metal L-shape fixed to the ceiling and a wall, with five small shaded lights hanging from it; the shades’ natural shapes acting as Thatcher’s signature. Moving forward, she is considering adapting the shades to different expressions of frames or wall fixtures—a single pendant, for example.
In part, this way of thinking about the different possible permutations of a design was influenced by her collaboration not only with Kaplan, but with an industrial designer she consulted on the new material and scale. “We worked together to produce it in such a way that [it] could break down into smaller pieces to ship from LA to New York, and even a practical decision like that made me consider different formal possibilities that I hadn’t really thought about before.”
While the material qualities of clay have always been a guiding light (no pun intended) for Thatcher, she admits that it can have a life of its own. Exploring new materials in earnest for the first time—even just working with a metal frame in the case of this most recent design—is allowing for more control in a way that hints at an expanded practice for the studio ahead.
As for its home in Kaplan’s studio, the chandelier is in good company alongside other contemporary work that is broadening the venn diagram between functional design and visual art. In addition to Kaplan’s own sculptural lighting works in clay, the studio’s new 4,000-square-foot space is filled with vases from designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen, chairs by Thomas Barger, and collaborations between Kaplan and other similarly energizing designers, artists, and craftspeople—and most commonly, those who may identify their practice as all three.
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