MANIFESTO OF A LAMPMAKER

Due to the fact that, as a practicing architectural and landscape designer, I have choreographed how people inhabit spaces and carry out their daily rituals, I would never have believed, three or more years ago when I started to make DESK LAMPs with organic materials imitating the mechanical arts, that I would ultimately feel the need to take stock of myself — to satisfy the desire to know the reasons for all that has occurred and the even still more tantalizing results: the effect, in other words. The influence that the garden of earthly delights has had on my designs, on their ability to reintroduce raw nature back indoors — at once tamed, reconfigured, liberated.

It disturbs me to watch the ground being excavated and the vegetation stripped bare to make way for a new building — that perhaps I might be one of those exploiters of nature and thus also myself upended and razed before the presumption of these deeds overwhelms.

I regret to say that the verdict is still pending; and to happily assert to those who refuse to acknowledge the reimagining of new tropes, whether by accident or design, that nothing has fully crystallized as yet, nor that all will be revealed. I can only say that today I am no longer as concerned as I was before in the face of these deep fakes or misinterpretations.

A designer or architect always feels uneasy when called an artist. Their work should be useful, practical, particularly when it is also deemed comfortable. What should we do now? Should we continue? No, what was once dismissed as the “unquantifiable usability of art” ultimately escapes this quandary.

So, it is necessary to re-create and re-form a constant physical fluidity in order to accommodate the interpretations that would allow a positive feedback of the senses.

Years ago, I went where I needed to go — out into the landscape or to the job site, to work outdoors in the open air, or to plant my feet firmly on the ground, hands in the dirt — it was healthy.

Simply, I wish to avoid falling under the spell of that phenomenon known as comfort design, which constrains our feelings and habits to the given tangible dimension. Testing the limits of materiality and form is precisely what the adventures of these past several years have attempted to entertain, with all the ensuing contortions and re-moldings.

Because functional design, regardless of its comfort level, is the absolute misrepresentation of usability — all that is usable is yet to be. This manifestation is always distinct from form and it is the provocateur of those feelings implied within it, which is the true interpretation of the decorative arts. Is it only comfort that makes a chair?

If we step back again, following the lines of my evolution, we thus arrive at a moment when I conceived of usable sculptures, produced with the aid of found organic and mineral substances. That was several years ago. The purpose of this was to be able to attain a displacement and reinterpretation of objects situated between myself and the endless bounty of nature.

But how long can a trans-dimensional pictorial interpretation endure?

The shape of the form, its outlines, its strange colors hovering between life and death, hold no interest for me. Only the imminent, pure plasticity is valid.

Let us live in the moment!

Micah Heimlich
Mojave Desert, California
February 2021