VIBEKE FONNESBERG SCHMIDT
Working at the intersection of design, art, and craft, Fonnesberg Schmidt was born in Denmark, but her creative career began in Japan, where she first studied ceramics. She continued her education back in Copenhagen at the Danish School of Design (now the Royal Danish Academy), where she honed her skills with porcelain and began a successful career as a studio potter. Over the years, her work has been featured in numerous galleries and museum exhibitions and is notably represented in the collections of institutions including Trapholt Museum for Modern Art and Design and Designmuseum Denmark.
Ceramics, however, ultimately proved limiting for Fonnesberg Schmidt, so she began exploring alternatives. After a period of creating objects in wood, she progressed to a material that allowed her to express her sculptural sensibility and explore the interplay of shape, light, and color in a whole new medium: plexiglass.
SCULPTOR OF LIGHT
From her studio in central Copenhagen, Fonnesberg Schmidt hand-builds unique sculptural lighting and bespoke chandeliers, most often combining plexiglass discs with fixings in metal, usually brass. Inspired by the use of geometry in architecture across the ages, her approach is methodical, systemic, and exploratory. She typically takes geometry as her starting point, crafting sculptural studies in form that walk the line between mathematics and art.
Plexiglass has proven to be the ideal material for her practice. It is lighter than glass, can be cut in any shape, and cast in almost any color or level of translucency. This versatility gives the designer an unparalleled level of control of the color and pattern of the light – with yet another dimension introduced when the light is switched off.
LIGHT MEETS ART
Named for the Italian word for ‘couple,’ the Coppia Table Lamp by Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt walks the line between design and sculpture – a characteristic of much of her work as a lighting designer. Coppia sits at the intersection of art, design, and craft, finding beauty by playing with geometry.
True to its name, Coppia is a design that celebrates pairings, meetings, and dualities. In Coppia, Fonnesberg Schmidt brings together two materials – stainless steel and plexiglass – in a double-shaded table lamp. Elegantly contoured, the lamp is formed from two sets of plexiglass discs in different sizes, pinned in place within a band of curved stainless steel, thus maintaining the shape of the lamp.