I’ve found that one of the biggest dilemmas I face as the owner of a fiber art supply and craft supply business is how to find a sweet spot between encouraging/sustaining creative integrity and promoting a business. As I populate this blog with posts I feel inspired to write, I’m noticing that they keep coming back to that particular crux: How to run a successful art supply business that takes its cues from the lessons I’ve learned while working as a fiberartist? I’m going to examine the “Bonbon Lamp” as a case study for tackling the issue of respecting the intellectual property of fellow creators.
“Intellecutal Property” (IP) and “Copyright Infringement” are always hotbed issues in creative communities–as they should be. We live in a world where businesses (and individuals) try to capitalize on the thought work (and thoughtful work) of others. It can be tricky to know where the boundary lives between respecting someone’s IP and abusing it. It can be difficult to gage how to responsibly riff on, build upon, traverse, or inhabit someone else’s creative premise.
But, like most things, the key is in trying to.
The key is in talking about that effort in a public way so that more generative discourse can evolve.
The key, as a fiber supply company especially, is to demonstrate that effort for folks who are new to their craft and might not have considered how to engage responsibly with someone else’s innovation.
The Ethical Dilemma
Last fall, one of our team members approached me with an idea. They’d encountered yarn-wrapped pendant lights on Pinterest and they wanted to try making one themselves. They’d scoured thrift stores in search of the perfect lampshade scaffolding to repurpose with a midcentury modern twist, but had come up empty handed. They’d tried finding online sources of lampshade frames, but that search also proved in vain. Any time we encounter the presence of desire to create something with fiber–especially if coupled with the absence of adequate materials to bring that project to life–we get excited! Pairing metal with fiber is, after all, the speciality of Unfettered Co And so we ran with this idea.
I started looking into yarn-wrapped pendant lights. I tried to uncover their point of origin and that search brought me to the work of Serbian designer, model, and photographer Ana Kras. As the story is told, Kras developed her first version of a Bonbon Lamp as part of her coursework in 2009. She eventually sold her design to HAY, an upscale Danish furniture company that is now mostly owned by Herman Miller.
This alone is interesting to me. Imagine concocting a design so special (while still a student) that it’s courted by a company wishing to reproduce that design and keep your name attached to it! Kras spent two years working with HAY to resolve issues that pertained to Bonbon lamps’ production process. The challenge was to move from a handmade object to an object that could be mass manufactured with greater consistency, yet still retain its hand-constructed aesthetic (impossible to reproduce without the lengthy process of hand weaving the lamp with tiny strands of fiber).
I’m struck by the opportunity that Ana Kras’ Bonbon Lamp design afforded her. And I’m left to wonder how the landscape of fiberart might be altered by more stories like hers–by more stories of corporations assigning value to an artist’s vision, respecting artists’ intellectual property, offering remuneration for the thought work of design, and building bridges between slow creation and mass production. Big brands like HAY’s are equipped with the resources to open meaningful doors for artists. How often do they, though?
Unpacking Ana Kras’s Vision
When selecting a furniture company to work with, Kras had different offers to contend with, but she ultimately settled on HAY because they left her feeling confident that her original vision for the Bonbon Lamp would be respected as it moved from hand-made to factory produced: “There were many copies of the lamp already around, but every single one looked messy and crafty. So it was very important for me that the lamp we put into production looked like my lamp–not like one of the bad copies…The Bonbon Lamp is very delicate. If the yarn doesn’t have a specific quality, if the details are not done right–it can easily look crafty, or like a craft project gone bad. It has to be very neat and polished. I like this particular yarn because it gives a dry finish and from a little distance you can’t even tell that it’s yarn; it looks like a solid surface, like a canvas.”
HAY retained the same wrapping fibre as Kras, and that’s what continues to give the Bonbon Lamp its refined aesthetic. I have to say that I balk at Kras’ derogation of the terms “craft” and “crafty” (as though the terms themselves somehow indicate failure). There’s a classed dimension to this dismissal in the sense that the ability to access different fibre to experiment with is a privilege unto itself. “A craft project gone wrong” is often a springboard for invention, growth, communal learning, and so on. Having said that, though, I also understand Kras’ insistence on sourcing the correct fibre to grant a desired aesthetic. On the one hand, the beauty of yarn-wrapped lamps is that they can shed light differently depending on their construction materials. There’s no “right” or “wrong” way to do so. Kras herself acknowledges this when noting that her “favourite thing about this product is that it has endless possibilities in the colours, and the shapes. It makes it easy to make something really classic and something over-the-top in the same production process, just by changing the shape and colouways.”
I agree completely and would add that it’s not just adjusting shapes and colourways that construe possibility, but material variance also lends itself to different voices and aesthetics and to the proliferation of design possibility (to the versatility that’s so brilliant about Kras’ innovative lights in the first place). Admittedly, though, I’ve also learned from (and internalized) Kras’ prioritization of weaving a solid-looking surface with the help of fine yarn. In my own perambulations with pendant lights, I’ve noticed that my personal preference lies with finely woven lights. Scaling down my materials to construe objects of greater consistency, rigour, refinement, realism, or detail has been motivating in my own journey with fiberart and macrame sculpture. So I do get it. But I also want for us to keep interrogating the dismissal of craft–especially as that dismissal is most often used to uplift art (or, in the Bonbon Lamp’s case, the dismissal of ‘craft’ is used to elevate design). We need less of that flawed (and false) relationality between art and craft, and we need fewer classist hierarchies between design and craft too.
The point of engaging in a conversation with Kras’ words about her work is to take her contributions seriously–to grapple with not only the formidable objects she’s designed, but also with the thought work that supports them. What stands out to me about the case of Ana Kras’ Bonbon Lamps is her insistence on retaining agency over the aesthetic of her work, even when selling it to a designer. I’ve learned something really important here: selling your design (or your work) does not mean buckling to the demands of commerce, the expectations of “the market,” and the pressures of mass production. Differently put, selling your designs does not have to entail the loss of voice or creative control over them. Good to know! I’ve searched high and low for somehwere–anywhere–that either Kras or HAY in fact mention how the Bonbon Lamps are now created. I’m not referring to technique so much as context: whose hands are doing this work? If the weaving is not situated in a mass production context, then where?
But I’ve really loved learning Kras’s thoughts about the lamps as material objects: “I always think about lamps in this way that they are around all day long,” she says, “they emit light only when it gets dark and then a lamp with the light turned off is an object just like any other object: like a sofa sofa or a chair. I do like that difference between on and off” (Kras). This strikes me as such an exciting creative challenge: the making of an object that holds space and function differently depending on the time of day (or night). While HAY markets Kras’ Bonbon Lamps mostly in their hanging form, she insists on her own preference across interviews. Seeing them more as objects of functional furniture, Kras was drawn to the practice of standing her lamps directly on shelves, tables, and stacks of books. A light that can function as pendant or desk lamp is so interestingly equipped, isn’t it? I’ve been really inspired by that particular innovation.
And yet, I’ve also encountered curious omissions in the materials used to market the Bonbon Lamp. Sometimes, it’s not until making a thing that you see what’s swept under the rug a little for the sake of a winning, stylized shot. In all of HAY’s photographs of Bonbon Lamps used sitting on a surface, there’s nary an electrical cord (a practical necessity of their illumination) in sight. Well, at times, it’s positioned unobtrusively threaded off to the lamp’s side….but how does it carry light to the bulb situated inside? The cord either has to spill out over the top surface of the light; or, it needs to be threaded underneath the lamp–but this would cause a break in where the lamp’s base meets the surface it sits upon (or, it would obstruct the tight threading of wool somewhere on the lamp’s outer surface). Further to the point, Bonbon lamps are marketed as though they float magically from a never-pictured ceiling or wall. If hanging from the ceiling or wall, there’s no indication of where the cord ultimately lives. We’ve entered the world of make-believe and sizeable photography budget here that overlooks the very practical struggle of staging these lamps. What do you do with their cords? How do you make those ugly realities of electrical plugins look at least somewhat ok?
Ethical Dilemma Resolved?
When delving into research and development for pendant lampshade frames that could be wrapped with yarn, I didn’t want to replicate (or encourage others to replicate) Ana Kras’ stylistic vision. It’s one thing for someone to craft an object of beauty for their own home. That’s permissible without infringing upon anyone’s intellectual property. It’s another thing altogether for a business like mine to manufacture a lampshade that directly copies Kras’ innovation, voice, and design. While I think it’s more than ok (it’s necessary, in fact) to find inspiration in the work of others, I don’t think it’s ok for that inspiration to go uncharted or underacknowledged. As an academic writer, I learned to cite my sources. I learned to keep elaborate notes in painstaking detail about how I came across a particular morsel of knowledge. My task when writing academically was to demonstrate the discipline and rigour of a roadmap of sorts: an exhaustive tableau of tracks that laid bare the ways in which I was building an ongoing conversation between my own thoughts and the thoughts of others. There’s an ethos to this. Of course we should employ the thought work of others in helping our thinking along! But the thing that allows us to do this responsibly is to give credit wherever and whenever it’s due.
It’s really important to me to give credit to Ana Kras for the Bonbon Lamps that she designed. They were innovative in 2009 and they’re still striking now.
I wrote to Ana Kras when in the research and development phase of creating pendant light frames to sell via Unfettered Supply, I detailed my business’s plans for the light frames and I asked for her informed consent in creating them. I closed that letter by saying that if I don’t receive a response, I’ll take that as a ‘no.’ Consent is crucial to me. I think we need to talk more about consent in creative communities, and I’m sure it’s a topic I’ll keep returning to on this blog. In the absence of a “yes,” we don’t have consent. Kras did not respond to my letter; I didn’t get the “yes” I’d hoped for. In the absence of that coveted “yes,” I wanted to unpack the ways that I’ve tried to proceed responsibly:
- By studying Ana Kras’ contributions to fiber design. By researching her interviews. By examining her words. By relating that work to you here. By pointing you to her story, her work, her innovations. By refusing to render her work invisible as if its invisibility would offer some sort of plausible deniability.
- By studying Ana Kras’ design and insight enough to be able to cite, differentiate from it, and build on its ommissions. In order to know where Kras’ voice ends and mine begins, I need to be able to map her vision/values asserted in her Bonbon Lamp design–and it’s only then that I can find my own spaces for addition, subtraction, and intervention.
- By developing lampshade frames in a different series of shapes than Kras. Where she choose rounded, usually asymmetrical contours, I opted for geometric ones. They propose a different aesthetic while retaining the innovation of wrapping yarn to construct a soft surface.
- By exploring colourways and stripe configurations of my own making. Where Kras’ collection tended toward light, neutral, earthy, subtle, quotidian shades that blend seamlessly together and with their surroundings, I took the opposing route of bold primary colours with stark black outlines accenting more frequent colour transitions.
- By acknowledging the omissions made by HAY’s marketing of Kras’ Bonbon Lamps and by subsequently designing (thereby rendering transparent in marketing) the forms of attachment that yarn-wrapped lights require, when stood upright on desktop surfaces or hung from a wall.
This work has left me with a sense of appreciation for Kras’s. Having gone through the process of trying to differentiate considerably from the aesthetic and shape and tone of her Bonbon Lamps, I find myself humbled before her vision. She was able to make something look quite simple, when in fact it’s exceptionally difficult. And that’s the mark of both tremendous skill and flawless design.
If you happen to use one of our frames to make yourself a light, I hope you’ll think of Kras’s work while doing so. Take inspiration from her, sure. But show gratitude for that inspiration by making her work visible to others too.
