Artist Highlight - CoCo Lemery

1. Your lamps begin with onion skins, a material normally treated as kitchen waste. What first made you look at them as a material with design potential?

The starting point was not the onion skin. It was a problem. Materials like crystal, alabaster, and selenite are overvalued in lighting design and unsustainable to mine and process. I wanted something that could do what these materials do so well: hold light, create warmth, stop you in your tracks. I began testing common kitchen waste because it was universal, available, and free.

2. The onion skin biomaterial changes when illuminated. What did light reveal about the material that was not visible before?

The sample I almost discarded was the one that changed everything. It had dried very dark and I had moved on from it entirely. Then I placed an LED mat behind all my samples. That one changed most completely. What had looked muddy and opaque became fully translucent. The fossilized onion skins, which had looked like a flaw, looked like something designed that way on purpose. Light did not improve the material. It revealed what the material had always been.

3. Bend Lamp, Grow Lamp and Rise Lamp each have a different scale and attitude. How did you think about the character of each lamp?

Each lamp grew from what the material was willing to do at a given scale and through a specific construction method. The Bend Lamp uses a paper mache-like hand fabrication process, producing something organic and gestural, shaped by hand pressure and material response. The Rise and Grow Lamps use press mold and bent lamination methods closer to paper pulp casting, introducing more architectural intention. The character of each lamp is less a design decision than a conversation with the method.

4. The collection keeps the recognisable language of domestic lighting, but the material introduces irregularity and fragility. Were you interested in disturbing the expectation of a clean, uniform lamp shade?

Completely intentional. I once accidentally enrolled in a horror fiction writing course and learned that people are more afraid of the unfamiliar than anything else. When developing a material the world has never seen, I chose to start with the most familiar, legible form available. The lamp shade is domestic, understood, and safe. The material inside that form is none of those things. The familiar form was never the destination. It was the beginning.

5. Your work challenges how value is assigned to materials. At what point does waste become precious in your process?

It starts precious. That is the point. My work pulls materials from abandonment and actively diverts waste from landfills, but the position underneath all of it is the same: the contemporary creative is tasked with seeing opportunity in what others have decided has none. The onion skin was never waste in my process. It was the starting material. The shift in perception happens for the viewer, not for me. I am already past it by the time they pick it up.

6. The lamps are functional, repairable and designed with removable shades and interchangeable fittings. How important is long term use to your idea of sustainability?

It is everything. Leading design for a Fortune 500 furniture company, I watched how little it mattered in practice. Affordable manufacturing runs on adhesive. Everything is glued together. Recyclability depends entirely on the ability to isolate individual materials, a capacity almost entirely lost in modern production. A lamp you can repair, a shade you can replace, a fitting you can swap: these are not features. They are a position on what designing responsibly actually requires.

7. There is a strong sensorial quality in the work. The lamps are not only sustainable objects, but also warm, textured and atmospheric. How do you balance research with emotional appeal?

The balance is constantly shifting. Every prototype generates feedback and I use that feedback to push the material further. Research sets the parameters and emotion tells me when I have found something worth staying with. The material itself is a collaborator. It has opinions. Some iterations I pushed technically that the material resisted aesthetically. Some I made carelessly that turned out beautiful. The balance is less a design methodology than an ongoing negotiation.

8. Onion skins carry a memory of cooking, domestic routine and decay. Do you want viewers to remain aware of that origin when they see the lamps?

Yes. The origin is not incidental to the object. It is the argument the object makes. A lamp shade that came from your kitchen, from something you handled and discarded without a second thought, now something you want to stand near and study in the dark: that sequence is the work. The domesticity of the material is not something to overcome. It is what makes the transformation meaningful.

9. What kind of shift in perception are you hoping for when a discarded kitchen material becomes a source of light?

I sleep with an early prototype as my bedside lamp and find myself marveling at it the way I would a vast canyon or ocean view. One of the great humbling challenges of making is the impossibility of producing anything as beautiful as what nature generates without effort or intention. To see something so familiar, something everyone has held and thrown away, recontextualized into an object you lie next to in the dark and quietly study: that is what I am hoping for. Not appreciation. Awe.