Karl Monies Reimagines Craft with Fungi-Inspired Lamps and Symbolic Vessels

Danish designer Karl Monies has presented a striking collection of lamps and vessels at 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen, where his work at the Other Circle platform highlighted a compelling fusion of inherited craft and contemporary artistic exploration. The exhibition featured mushroom-like lamps that seemed to organically emerge from their surroundings, alongside symbolic vessels that challenge traditional definitions of form and function.

Fungi-Inspired Illumination

The centerpiece of Monies’ display were his mushroom-like lamps, first developed in his 2024 Bonum Lumen series for the Macro exhibition. These pieces, presented at Other Circle, featured coppery caps that gathered light beneath their rims, resting on beds of moss and lichen. The lamps sat low to the floor in metal trays, with visible cables and surfaces marked by rivets, seams, and oxidized metal finishes in blues and browns.

This design language draws from Monies’ broader practice, where objects often exist between furniture and sculpture, utility and artistic statement. While functioning as a light source, the lamps also evoke fragments of a forest, handmade instruments, or peculiar domestic creatures. Their construction is plainly evident, with faceted metal sheets joined visibly, rivets tracing their bodies, and oxidized colors applied unevenly, giving each piece a unique, almost self-adjusted appearance as if grown organically.

Inherited Craft and Symbolic Vessels

Monies views craft as a dynamic inheritance, not a static tradition. His work picks up on established material languages and allows them to evolve into more unusual forms. This approach is also evident in his ceramic vessels, which often combine glazed stoneware with materials like cork and patterned climbing rope. These containers draw inspiration from various eras and cultures, moving between references to sake bottles and modernist design objects without direct imitation.

His earlier Arcana series, shown in 2019, further emphasized this symbolic dimension. Drawing from themes of magic, tarot, and ritual instruments, Monies treated objects as tools for thought as much as for practical use. This perspective positions the vessel as a carrier of memory, belief, and material experimentation, extending the conceptual depth of his creations.

A Cross-Disciplinary Platform

The presentation at Other Circle, a cross-disciplinary platform, situated Monies’ work within a larger dialogue about craft as something alive, mutable, and open to new interpretations. His practice spans ceramics, furniture, painting, and jewelry, but the Copenhagen installation placed a strong emphasis on light and landscape. The earlier Macro exhibition at Etage Projects in Copenhagen saw the moss bases transform the lamps into small ecosystems, creating a tension between the soft organic surfaces and the hammered metal, with warm light emanating from within. This staging turned the gallery floor into a terrain that was part woodland, part workshop.

Monies’ objects often begin with familiar typologies—vessels, lamps, urns, bottles—and then subtly alter them, creating a sense of being slightly out of time. The mushroom lamps embody this, suggesting folklore, fungi, shelter, and decay, while their construction remains transparent.

The designer’s approach allows objects to hold traces of the past while remaining open to future rituals, uses, and meanings. In the context of 3daysofdesign, Karl Monies’ work offered a tangible expression of craft as an evolving practice, integrating metalwork, landscape, light, and handmade irregularities into forms that resist easy categorization.

Key facts

The development matters for Paionia7 readers as it showcases an innovative approach to design that bridges traditional craft techniques with contemporary artistic expression and material experimentation. Monies’ work, particularly his fungi-inspired lamps and symbolic vessels, offers a fresh perspective on how objects can embody cultural heritage while simultaneously pushing aesthetic and functional boundaries, aligning with the site’s focus on design, architecture, and material innovation.

Source: Karl Monies shapes inherited craft into glowing fungi and symbolic vessels – Designboom – https://www.designboom.com/design/karl-monies-inherited-craft-fungi-vessles-lamps-other-circle-3daysofdesign-copenhagen/