A Collection of Behaviours

Artificial light has long carried more than utility. In 1806, Humphry Davy’s arc lamp dazzled London lecture halls with spectacle as much as science. By the late nineteenth century, Louis Comfort Tiffany turned lamps into objects of beauty, dispersing colour through stained glass. In 1930, László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage made illumination itself perform.

A Collection of Behaviours at LAMB Gallery extends this lineage into contemporary material practice, foregrounding the ways light acts through form. The exhibition presents sculptural lamps by twelve artists from Brazil, Mexico, Europe, the United States and the United Kingdom who treat light as a living material. Each work enacts a behaviour — stretching, swelling, or coiling — so that illumination communicates with matter to reveal its own distinct temperament. This material sensibility runs through the works on view.Light in James Cherry’s nylon resin membranes animates the surface, which seems to stretch and shift like skin under light. Marrow’s stitched linen references and rescales bone fragments. Flavie Audi’s pink and yellow glass table lamp carries geological textures, almost crystalline in tone. Thomas Hutton’s Roman alabaster and Egyptian peperino stone forms emit quiet inner glows, while Yoon Shun’s layered burnt oak leaves and bamboo root stem bloom like an artichoke. Palma’s Mikado balances a glowing eggshell dome on forty-one delicate hand-painted legs, animate like a creature lifted on fine limbs.Coco Crampton’s two lamps, The Truth About Cottages, made in collaboration with Jochen Holz, recall the colander-shaped shades at Charleston, Vanessa Bell’s Sussex farmhouse and HQ of the Bloomsbury circle. Kauani (Inés Llasera and Inés Quezada) present five knitted table lamps inspired by seed forms and organic growth. Their woven surfaces bristle with threads and spikes, pigments shifting from pale green to pink and violet. Kerim Seiler’s red Light Saber is a stripped branch lit from behind by a narrow beam, condensing illumination into a single vertical line.

By Jamps, founded by Martha McGuinn and Tom Pearson, present two lamps from their Vogueing series — polished aluminium figures caught mid-pose. Sophie Wahlquist’s ceramic tree-like totem looks grown with its twisty and spiky snakeskin like texture, lightbulbs protruding like thorns. Nearby, James Sibley closes the exhibition with two small lamps resting on carpets, their shades made from 35mm slides: one showing stills of the first documentation of eclipse, the other sunrises from films Sibley has watched in 2025. The slides filter light into a grid that delicately spreads across the walls, carrying faint projections around the room.

Installed across three adjoining rooms, the works form a shifting rhythm of light that turns the gallery into a responsive environment, more organism than display. The exhibition includes new commissions by Flavie Audi, James Cherry, Thomas Hutton, By Jamps, Yoon Shun, James Sibley, Sophie Wahlquist and Kauani, alongside recent works by Coco Crampton, Marrow, Palma and Kerim Seiler.