Blog
Spheres &
Calendars
Project M and Portfolio Center alumna Melissa Cullens eschews the prevailing nomenclature of contemporary hipsterdom in her personal marketing. When every twenty-something with a Macbook refers to himself as a “Designer,” Melissa prefers “Thinker/Maker/Apple-Pie-Baker.” Although the cute rhyme is one of the many reasons we’re fond of Melissa, we’re prepared to wreck her winsome titular doggerel. It seems like she’s going to have a real mess on her hands when she tries to integrate “high-concept lighting designer” into that little epithet of hers.
Melissa and People of Resource have a brief but vivid history together. When we’ve needed extra hands and brains on deck, Melissa has enthusiastically pitched in. Her talent and intelligence have been a boon to us and we were honored that she would trust us with the fabrication of her lamp prototype, a project many months in the making.
The video above details some of the work that went into bringing this piece to life. For more on the concept, see Melissa’s description below:
“I started out trying to create a lamp that would also function as a calendar. Wanting to get something that dealt more with form than numbers, I thought for a long time about the ways that we’ve marked time throughout history, and how we experience time in seasons. I also didn’t want to limit the accuracy of the lamp by location, and in the end what sifted out was the concept of the solstice. It’s just so wonderfully ancient, and the length of the day marks our lives in an innate way that transgresses barriers of culture and location.
From a form standpoint, it breaks the year into two segments of continuous movement as we move closer and further from the sun. The diameter of the nested hemispheres reflects the eclipsis, (the arc of the sun through the sky) which becomes measurably longer and longer, as the length of the day increases.”
