Snowball designed in the year 2009 by Carsten Jörgensen is referencing the long tradition of paper lanterns we know from China and Japan. The design is although not an iconoclastic approach but rather an attempt to give something valued a twist. Paper lanterns are in reality extremely demanding craft objects when paper is bent over a framework of thin bamboo sticks. To get a flat sheet of paper to bend along the bamboo constructions curves demand deep knowledge and extraordinary skills since paper can’t be forced into a 3 dimensional double curved plan. The cocooning material used for our lamps has entire different material properties since it has the ability to shrink over frames of sturdy wires resulting in so called double curved planes hardly achievable in any other material. These planes seem to be of an organic character and of a highly aesthetic beauty. Since design oscillates between sheer functionality and the brain's ability, in a hallucinating way, to combine what we see and what we think we see, blended with an infinite number of sensitive experiences. Then it is no wonder that seeing the imprint of one's fingers in a snowball has a similarity with the concave helix plane winding around the bulb in an object named Snowball pretending to be a lamp. Light is although filtered, bended, reflected and refracted along these curves and appears glowing complementary to the perception of a snowball. That is the point, hard to comprehend, but contradictions often foster huge energies out of which light in splendid granulated crystals can be imagined to spread in waves like rings of waves when a stone is thrown into a pond.

Designed in 2009