The first solo exhibition from the British design duo, James Plumb, is on show at London’s Gallery Fumi. Hannah Plumb and James Russell discuss their development process for the sculptural lighting pieces featured. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This is Monocle on Design Extra.
It's a short show to accompany our weekly program where we discuss everything from architecture and craft to furniture and fashion.
I'm Maile Evans.
On display at Gallery Fumi in London's Mayfair is Rooted, the first solo exhibition of British design duo James Plum.
It's a showcase that continues the designer's exploration of sculptural lighting pieces.
Their latest collection, Copper Roots, incorporates salvaged material from their home, a renovated farmhouse in the Shropshire Hills.
To find out more about the development process of Copper Roots and the wider evolution of this design studio, Monocle's Sana Girmani visited Gallery Fumi to meet Hannah Plum and James Russell.
Copper Roots is an evolution of a previous series, Steel Roots, centred around candlelight.
And the main forms were taken from steel rebar from deconstructed demolished high rises around London.
And then we made these sort of modular candle based chandeliers and so on.
We've now evolved it to electric lights.
Very, very similar to the Steel Roots, but it's now with electric lights instead of candles.
And I read that you kind of very much wanted to keep that kind of essence of candlelight, but have kind of developed these bulbs.
Can you talk a bit about what that process was like?
We were resistant for a long time to do an electric version.
A lot of people loved the Steel Route series and loved the candlelight, but they wanted the relatively more convenience of electricity and so on.
The permanence of electricity.
For a long time we thought it in our minds wasn't possible and it technically wasn't possible with the steel.
We recently moved to Shropshire Hills and part of the renovation process, we were pulling old copper pipe out of one of the houses.
We didn't realize initially, but.