LightArt is excited to unveil the Ribbon Cloud Pendant — a nod to their local skies in winter’s darkest months. This new forward-thinking fixture borrows elements of the company’s original Ribbon Cloud chandeliers for a light-weight, more compact cloud.
Inspired by LightArt’s earliest forms and sculptures, the team behind the new pendants wanted to represent the soft, calming clouds adrift overhead into this new, lightweight fixture. The Ribbon Cloud Pendants offer the same custom and sculptural feel as LightArt’s original cloud-like creation; now available at a more affordable price point with sizing options for smaller spaces. Incorporating biophilic design reminiscent of the natural environment, Ribbon Cloud Pendants offer soft and glowing features that Ryan Smith, founder and Creative Director, and his team hope will inspire a sense of feeling in designers and their clients.
“Besides needing light to see and navigate through space, a lot of lighting can go beyond its function and become this emotional and inspirational part of people's lives. A fixture like the Ribbon Cloud Pendant gives you a wonderful way of seeing something from the natural world differently.”
Incorporating a matte finish and sophisticated look, LightArt encases fabric between thin layers of Varia – parent company 3form’s formable material. Interlayers produce a unique texture and form and give the pendants richness, while the frosted qualities of the material transmit light for a glowing, trace paper-like aura. The dimensionality of the fabric captures subtle luminous shadows, giving the fixtures their cloud inspired look and name. The Ribbon Cloud Pendants are standard in white, but are also available in 250+ custom color options.
The production of LightArt’s Ribbon Cloud Pendants are similar to the company's traditional custom creations, but paired back for replication and sustainability. The task at hand was to create repeatable shapes without losing the look of the hand-formed, sculptural pieces signature to LightArt. The Ribbon Cloud Pendant has allowed the team to eliminate the complexity of producing larger pieces and return to a more straightforward application.
Staying true to LightArt’s sustainability-focused product offerings, the improved technology enables the Ribbon Cloud Pendants to use 75% less material, while maintaining the same high quality look and feel. Thinner material not only reduces environmental impact, but leads to a more user-friendly product that is unconstrained by space-conscious environments. LightArt’s new fixtures can hang off of a single junction box, which allows for more flexibility in price and scale and ease in installation. The Ribbon Cloud Pendants exemplify the company's work to continuously push the envelope, by improving lighting technologies and design to create high-performing, sustainable products.
“I always enjoy the frosted, sculpted pieces frozen in motion,” says Smith. “Capturing that movement in lighting is amazing. Coming from an architecture background, everything has rules — this is one area where you can break those rules and sculpt shapes that defy gravity. These pieces go outside the realm of architecture and create a spatial, emotional experience.”
Unlike larger chandeliers, Ribbon Cloud Pendants bring the look and feel of residential lighting to commercial spaces. The pendants highlight an ongoing theme in LightArt’s work — making functional pieces that dually serve as an art piece or focal point in a room. LightArt's design team hopes to go beyond serving the function of lighting — they aim to evoke emotion and create a striking design element in a space. The Ribbon Cloud Pendant does just that.
“Lighting, like color, can change a room, and I hope that never gets old. Creating an experience is not just a fashionable thing, but an emotional one. LightArt will continue making functional products that solve problems, but our business will forever continue to be rooted in inspiration, color, and highlighting what it is people love about their space.”