Hasta La Ideas

London designer Paul Cocksedge recently completed another sculpture resembling pieces of paper caught in the breeze, although this time the leaves glow like a swarm of fireflies.

Installed in the courtyard of a hotel in Lyon, the 25-metre-long Bourrasque sculpture was completed for the city’s annual Festival of Lights.

The 200 suspended sheets were made from an electrically conductive material that lights up when a current passes through it.

Each sheet was the same size as a sheet of A3 paper and was moulded into shape by hand.

Previous paper-like structures by Cocksedge include a cloud of Corian in the hallways of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and floating steel sheets of poetry at Beijing Design Week.

Photography is by Mark Cocksedge.

The following text is from Paul Cocksedge Studio:

Bourrasque – Lyon – Fête des Lumières – 8th to 11th December 2011

A ream of paper scatters in a gust of wind, soaring high into the black winter night, every sheet glowing bright, against a backdrop of the most exquisite 17th century architecture…

The site is the grand courtyard of Lyon’s Hotel de Ville, and the occasion is the city’s annual Festival of Light, a winter tradition drawing thousands of visitors to its festive attractions.

In his installation “Bourrasque”, designer Paul Cocksedge has combined his interest in the nature and morphology of paper with a subject that has long been an important element of his design work: light…

In both scale and technique, this is an ambitious project. “Bourrasque”, measures 25 metres in length and reaches over 15 metres at its highest point. The 200 A3-sized sheets are made from electroluminescent (EL) material, a technology which has recently advanced rapidly to produce a range of sophisticated colour temperatures, in thin and extremely flexible sheets. Each of these double-sided sheets has been individually moulded by hand in London, and then assembled on site in a structure of extraordinary finesse and detail barely visible to the human eye.

Paul Cocksedge explains: “I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the various properties of light: how it emanates, how it diffuses, bends, reflects, and scatters. With these EL sheets I’ve been able to explore much further the idea of light as a flat object, as something touchable and malleable – not housed in a glass bulb or a neon strip, but an object you can bend and twist – and almost see it come alive in your hands…”

You might see these luminous sheets as documents that have suddenly escaped the confines of the offices and archives housed in this historic building, merrily fluttering on the wintry air… Equally, one might be reminded of the future of the paper medium itself, and specifically the new prototype developments in the physical shape of written media: thin, flexible tablets for downloading newspapers and magazines, perhaps even television and film.

As with all Paul Cocksedge’s work, “Bourrasque”, shows his acute sense of the role of technology in design, combined with a characteristic lightness of touch, with elegance and joy.