Yuko Nishikawa’s You See a Sheep lighting collection, crafted from clay and paper, creates dreamlike environments with its amorphous pendant lights and vases. Inspired by literary works, the project uses coiling techniques to shape perforated shells that emit warm, mysterious light. Exhibited at Galerie JAG in Paris, the main installation is a chandelier composed of 24 suspended shells, offering an immersive experience for visitors.
Japanese artist Yuko Nishikawa creates suspended, perforated lamps made from clay and paper, forming ethereal compositions in her lighting collection, You See a Sheep.
The pastel-colored series features amorphous pendant lights and vases, inspired by surreal and imaginative concepts. Each lamp is handcrafted with a ceramic shell, housing a light source and hanging from the ceiling by a thin metal wire.
According to Nishikawa, the collection draws inspiration from two books: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Model T Frankenstein by Hideo Furukawa. In The Little Prince, the narrator is asked to draw a sheep but instead sketches a box, stating that the sheep is inside. In Furukawa’s work, the opening line, “You see a goat,” suggests that perception alone brings the goat into existence.
The artist describes the experience as creating an environment where floating objects surround the viewer, evoking a sense of disorientation in space, where gravity and room boundaries vanish, leading to feelings of happiness.
Nishikawa constructs each lamp by mixing paper fiber with wet clay, forming the material into hollow, bulbous shapes through a coiling technique that emphasizes the irregularity of the surface. She layers long rolls of clay to achieve the desired forms.
Once dried, the lamps are perforated with holes, covered in colored clay, and fired in an electric kiln. Their textured surfaces and soft, rosy tones produce a warm glow when illuminated.
Initially developed in 2018, You See a Sheep is being exhibited at Galerie JAG in Paris from 21 September to 21 November 2020, marking Nishikawa’s first solo show in the city.
The exhibition’s main installation is a chandelier composed of 24 ceramic shells, arranged in formations that adapt to the site’s layout and spatial volume. The configuration pictured was first displayed at the In Good Company group exhibition at Fernando Mastrangelo Studio in New York in 2018.
Nishikawa envisioned the exhibition as a celebration of art and design, aiming to foster a supportive community between designers and users. The chandelier’s design incorporates shells at varying heights, creating a conical form that encourages viewers to walk through and engage with the piece.
In a similar approach, design studio I/thee used papier-mâché forms in an architectural project, casting nearly 300 pounds of paper into holes in the ground and then inverting them to create self-supporting dome structures, among the largest of their kind.
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