Calabarte Gourd Lamps Will Bring Light To Your Life

oh my gourd

“I started making lamps in 2009 when, for the first time in my life, I accidentally came across the gourd fruit. As soon as I made my first gourd lamp, I knew that I wanted to make another, and shortly after that it became my great passion,” says Przemek Krawczyński, a Polishman who went from studying engineering and working in an architectural studio to quitting both to make beautiful lamps.

The gourd that Krawczyński makes his Calabarte lamps out of is the Senegalese calabash, commonly used in cuisine but here used as a delivery vessel to transmit beams of complicated, psychedelic patterns. Inspired by geometry, fractals and the works of M.C Escher and Haeckel, the lamps are where Krawczyński’s scientific mind meets his artistic inclinations. His first few lamps – made from Polish goose gourds – were relatively simple affairs, but bearing his trademark precise perforations that play with the light emanating from within. His first work with Senegalese calabash also marked the debut of Calabarte’s naming scheme – every lamp from here on bears a number ascribing its design, the first being Table Lamp VII Globe, a spherical illumination of the world.

His designs quickly gained more complexity, with the aid of a high-speed air turbine delivering the perforations with pinpoint accuracy. Table Lamp XIII is a kaleidoscope of runes, Table Lamp XX Butterfly is a lepidoptoral splendour, while Table Lamp XXI Questa is enthrallingly labyrinthine, perched on a base of black jeweller waxed string. Krawczyński has also expanded to other forms, including wall, floor and pendant lamps. The attention to detail is painstaking, one of the reasons Krawczyński only produces 34 lamps a year, each of which takes up to three months to finish and sells from US$12,000 (RM49,000).

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