Craft maker, designer and artist – Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt lives up to all three titles.
Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt translates geometric shapes into complex, organic lamp compositions combining transparent and opalised plexiglass surfaces. This encounter gives rise to a contrast-filled interplay of geometry, construction and the light source, producing reflections, mirror effects, and light.
About the lights
Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt handbuilds exclusive one-off lamps in plexiglass and brass with reminiscences of 1960s Italian design, French Art Nouveau and German Bauhaus modernism.
With an experienced eye developed over her long and esteemed practice as a maker and designer, Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt creates lamps in a new idiom that stands at the intersection of art, craft and design.
The narrative quality of Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt’s lamps lies in the potentials of the colours. In their intuitive recognizability and often surprising interplay of geometry, light and material, the designs are exquisite eye candy.
In recent years, Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt has worked with world-renowned partners, including Nilufar Gallery and Dimore Studio in Milan, as well as leading international interior designers, acknowledging the strength of Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt’s handbuilt lamps and their sublime aesthetic friction.
Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt's lamps are hybrids of lightness and solidity, opal and transparent light effects, and infinite expressions of light controlled in a nuanced spectrum.
The lamps are sculptures—on or off—and as such, they offer more than the sum of their parts: a profound understanding of form, a disharmonious harmony, a poetic and coherent unity of repetitive, constructive principles and thematic variation. When switched on, the lamps generate new nuances and offer a glimpse of the structural frame through the translucent layers.
Proces
Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt’s work is methodical, driven by a system and its inherent possibilities and structure. The repetition, spatial dimensions, and symmetries break down, shift, and displace to create new constellations.
The lamps have a complex sculptural tactility as the plexiglass elements fold and unfold in a carefully choreographed practice at the intersection of mathematics and art.
Precise and painstaking craftsmanship shape Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt's lamps. She continuously works with dedicated and highly competent craftspeople, such as the experienced brazier and the dedicated plexiglass manufacturer.
"There is something akin to being in love with creating computer drawings, having the sheets cut, and finally assembling them. Going from visualisation to tangible reality is an amazing and satisfying process."
Background and education
Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt studied ceramics in Japan, an experience which led her to pursue a degree in ceramics from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and to study at the Glasgow School of Art.
After working with ceramics and exhibiting widely with ceramics, she has since 2012 focused on working with lighting.
Her work as a lighting designer and ceramic artist has been present in numerous exhibitions, including at the Danish Design Museum, Trapholt Museum, Rörstrand Museum, Danish Architecture Center and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, and is in the collection of the Danish Design Museum, the CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, the Danish Art Foundation, the New Carlsberg Foundation, and the Trapholt Museum among others.