light sculptures preserve ancestral designs through antique doilies and lace textile

"Lana Launay's Kinship series aims to preserve the antique doilies and ancestral lace-like textiles that have been passed down through generations using glowing light sculptures. At first glance, Kinship I and II illuminate with amorphous patterns, but up close, their surfaces resolve into lace. Doilies, stockings, and fragments of textile are stretched, wrapped, and held within stainless steel frameworks, then activated from within by LED light embedded in aluminum housings. The result is a series of industrial lighting pieces meeting inherited cloth."

"The textiles themselves are not decorative afterthoughts. Each doily has been collected from different families, passed down through generations before entering the light works. Once domestic objects - resting on tables, tucked beneath porcelain, stored in drawers - they are repositioned as ancestral ornaments onto the light sculptures by Lana Launay. When unlit, their patterns remain subtle, and once illuminated, the lace projects webs of shadow and light onto surrounding walls, the negative space within each stitch becoming as active as the thread itself."

"Stockings add another layer of diffusion onto the light sculptures by artist Lana Launay. Stretched across the steel forms, they soften the LED's glow as the light seeps through fiber and filament, revealing variations in the woven fabrics. The lace patterns overlap and intersect, creating layered grids: lines cross and reconnect, as if the antique materials themselves map out decades of history and relationship."

Lana Launay integrates antique doilies, stockings, and textile fragments into stainless steel light sculptures that preserve inherited fabrics while activating them with internal LED illumination. Each cloth item originates from family hand-me-downs and carries unique wear, discoloration, and repairs that inform the sculpture's form. When unlit the textiles read as subtle surfaces; when lit the lace projects intricate webs of shadow and light, with negative space as active as thread. Stretched stockings soften and diffuse the LEDs, and overlapping lace patterns create layered grids that suggest decades of relationship and memory.

Read at designboom | architecture & design magazine