Sugar Lamp by Fernando Laposse

Posted by Jess Knowles, 23rd July 2012


Fernando Laposse, an experimental young Mexican designer based in England has explored sugar blowing and as a result created this beautiful pendant lamp. The striking colours are obtained by using food colourings.


"The Sugar Lamp is a continuation of my sugar-glass project where  I worked with sugar to make it look like glass. I tried freehand sugar pulling and blowing but eventually chose rotomoulding as my preferred technique to create thin hollow vessels. The lamp was an exercise to see how big I could go without having to build a more complicated apparatus."

"Besides the wooden masters which were turned in the wood workshop at my school, everything was done in my kitchen."


"The mould that shapes the Sugar Lamp is a simple silicone sleeve mould backed with plaster. The sugar is melted to a temperature known as the hard-crack state and then poured into the mould to then be rotated by hand. The two pieces are welded together using  a creme brulé blowtorch and the lightbulb is encapsulated in the lamp. The piece is ephemeral as it progressively melts under the heat of the bulb and of course it is totally edible."


Laposse has recently been leaning more towards food design yet he approaches it in such a way that it looks like the objects are created using conventional materials.

www.fernandolaposse.com