This sconce is bananas!
The New York–based designer and artist Steffany Trần of the studio Vy Voi makes some of my favorite household objects, like handmade porcelain vases (opens in new window) shaped to resemble tropical fruits, finished in smudgy colored glazes with diverting names (“Egg Coffee with Moss, sponged”), and lamps (opens in new window) that look like delicate blimps. Thus far, Trần has specialized mostly in table lamps of various sizes, but recently she debuted a new lighted object: the sconce (opens in new window). Like all her work, it is inspired by a specific aspect of her Vietnamese heritage and draws on Vietnamese material culture. She used dó paper (handmade in northern Vietnam from the bark of the dó tree) to sculpt a series of rectangular, wall-mounted lanterns that take their shape from the banana-leaf parcels, wrapped and tied with string, that are used to cook, keep, and carry food, typically rice and rice-based snacks.
Trần said the sconces came out of a challenge she set for herself one day—to come up with a new design in 30 minutes or less. She wanted it to go in “a different direction” from her existing oeuvre of softer, rounder forms. “The throughline for my work is this idea of finding tenderness in everyday objects,” Trần said in a phone interview. “So even if the sconce is more geometric, there is still that softness that’s very subtle. There’s a little bit of curvature around the edges and the frame itself to give it a softer language.”
Though she often begins a new design by sketching out a rough idea, Trần has found that she makes the most progress in her process in the hand-building phase. “The actual prototyping—when I’m holding up paper, cutting up cardboard, working with clay, cutting up wood, or whatever that might be—that part is more about refinement and actually seeing things 3D,” she said. “That becomes a little bit more ‘A-ha!’ than just pen and paper.”
