One Day I'll Design the Perfect Paper Lightshade

This is a lamp design. It expands my earlier lighting concepts, which seek to simultaneously transgress and accommodate the axioms of modernism in search of new forms of expression. In this piece a wire frame 'wastepaper basket' contains a light bulb set in the centre. Crumpled sheets of paper surround the light source; each sheet containing discarded sketch ideas for paper lights. The rejected sketch sheets function as the diffuser or shade. Process and product are intermingled; process becomes product and the outcome is both a product and a narrative about the trial and error of idea generation.

The piece formulates a kind of perpetually renewed conceptual ideal and in a sense the representation of the quest for the perfect paper light shade becomes an icon for perfection. Evoking specific modernist axioms and texts ('Decoration and Crime' - Adolph Loos, 'Continuous Revolution' - Walter Gropius and 'Truth to Materials' - Constantine Brancusi) the piece paradoxically conforms to the ideology of Modernism while contradicting this ideology with its realised form.

Ralph Ball is an artist and designer and Professor of Furniture Design(MA Design by Project course) at Central Saint Martins His work is in permanent collections in the UK and USA, and he has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe, Japan and the USA. He has completed two solo exhibitions in London: Modern Movements~Ralph Ball Concord Sylvania gallery, 1997, and Ralph Ball~Introspective Furniture Plateaux Gallery, Tower Bridge Piazza, London 1998.

Naylor and Ball currently develop conceptual artifacts, which both illuminate and question design culture. They call this activity 'Design Poetics'. Design Poetics forms an experimental, continuously evolving series of objects and collections, which act as commentaries and contemplations on the cultures of Modernism, Postmodernism and contemporary design.