For the past two months, I have been reading Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus alongside Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Belonging entirely to one side has always been difficult for me. Perhaps that is why I read the two books at the same time. Or perhaps I simply cannot let go of either.

I approach materials in much the same way.

I use bronze and glass together. Sometimes one dominates, sometimes the other. I do not want to obey a predetermined rule, nor a prescribed proportion — not even a golden one. Nature will eventually find the proportion for us.

Bronze and glass. Material and human.

The relationship between them has fascinated me since the first day I entered this world. At some point, material begins to resemble the human, and the human begins to resemble the material. The transformation happens suddenly and quietly. Often, nobody notices it happening.

I began to understand this while developing the Pebble Sconce, when I met the extraordinary artists and craftspeople behind the work.

Of course, we should not think only about the final object. The finished piece belongs to you, its owner. But the craftspeople and we, the designers, are there from its first moment until its last. For a while, we become inseparable from the material.

If I were the first person to say such a thing, I might question whether I had the right to. Yet in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, even the relationship between Sisyphus and his stone seems to suggest something similar: through repetition, resistance and intimacy, the boundary between a person and what they work upon begins to disappear.

We spend our time revealing what is hidden within the material — shaping it, polishing it, allowing its beauty to emerge. And eventually, all that beauty comes together for you.

What remains is to look into that brightness and enjoy it.

The Souls Behind Bronze and Murano Glass

Polished bronze, brass and hand-blown Murano glass can be surprisingly difficult to separate in this sense. Their physical qualities are different, but perhaps their deepest differences can best be understood through the people who work with them.

If you want to create a high-end object, you first need a high-end spirit.

Something individual, peculiar, almost impossible to explain.

If you want to understand these craftspeople, look at what they make. They refine something of themselves and pour it into their work. Their patience, their experience, their instincts and even their imperfections remain somewhere inside the finished object.

For an artist — a real artist — calling something simply good or bad becomes increasingly difficult.

Anyone who spends enough time with art eventually encounters this problem. If everything you see can still be divided comfortably into beautiful and ugly, perhaps you have not yet encountered the true difficulty of being an artist.

Good and evil can become equally complicated.

The Glassmaker

Unless you have spent more than thirty years creating special-edition handmade glass, understanding what people mean when they speak about the “soul of glass” is not easy.

It is not simply a technique. It is a way of life.

Like a pebble, a life is shaped over years — polished by time, pressure and wind.

Once molten glass leaves the furnace, the glassmaker does not have much time.

Yet there is no panic.

After decades of working with the material, the hands already know something the mind no longer needs to explain. Wherever the wind may carry the glass, the maker trusts that it will carry its beauty with it.

Imagine a bird gliding through the air in perfect balance. The smallest movement of its head can change the entire line of its flight.

Working with hand-blown Murano glass can feel much the same.

Beyond good and evil, the glassmaker turns the material gently from side to side with extraordinary awareness, maintaining an almost impossible balance between control and surrender — and then trusts what emerges.

This kind of work requires faith.

It requires attention.

It requires trust beyond simple judgments of good and bad.

Trust in the possibility of a greater beauty.

The Bronze Maker

And then there is bronze.

Look into the polished bronze behind the Pebble Sconce and notice your own face reflected between its forms. I cannot help but say how beautiful a smile looks inside that warmth and brightness.

Perhaps that is fitting.

Because these surfaces are made by people with remarkable smiles themselves.

It is difficult to speak for craftspeople without truly knowing them. Still, there is something I have noticed about the designers and bronze artisans I have worked with: they want to understand everything before it happens.

They calculate.

They anticipate.

They prepare.

Not because they want to control the soul of the object, but because they want to create enough space for that soul to appear.

Precision becomes a way of protecting the unexpected.

The structure is considered, the proportions are studied, the bronze is cast, worked and polished — but somewhere inside this carefully constructed system, a small space is deliberately left open.

A space for the material.

A space for the hand.

A space for beauty to become something we could not completely predict.

Because when the work is truly good, it does more than become a beautiful object.

It elevates the spirit of the person who made it.