light sculptures preserve ancestral designs through antique doilies and lace textile

Lana Launay brings antique doilies to light sculptures

Lana Launay’s Kinship series aims to preserve the antique doilies and ancestral lace-like textiles that have been passed down through generations using glowing light sculptures. At first glance, Kinship I and II illuminate with amorphous patterns, but up close, their surfaces resolve into lace. Doilies, stockings, and fragments of textile are stretched, wrapped, and held within stainless steel frameworks, then activated from within by LED light embedded in aluminum housings. The result is a series of industrial lighting pieces meeting inherited cloth.

The textiles themselves are not decorative afterthoughts. Each doily has been collected from different families, passed down through generations before entering the light works. Once domestic objects – resting on tables, tucked beneath porcelain, stored in drawers – they are repositioned as ancestral ornaments onto the light sculptures by Lana Launay. When unlit, their patterns remain subtle, and once illuminated, the lace projects webs of shadow and light onto surrounding walls, the negative space within each stitch becoming as active as the thread itself.

all images courtesy of Lana Launay | photos by Alexander Cooke

artist assembles the lighting pieces by hand

Stockings add another layer of diffusion onto the light sculptures by artist Lana Launay. Stretched across the steel forms, they soften the LED’s glow as the light seeps through fiber and filament, revealing variations in the woven fabrics. The lace patterns overlap and intersect, creating layered grids: lines cross and reconnect, as if the antique materials themselves map out decades of history and relationship.

The artist assembles the pieces by hand, so no two editions are identical. Each textile fragment carries its own history of wear, discoloration, and repair, and the steel frame adapts accordingly, depending on the dimensions of the cloth. The light sculptures by Lana Launa keep the past and present intertwined and alive, as heirloom textiles wrapped around an industrial piece of lighting become the canvas for preserving private, familial memories. Through the series, light constructs an archive, one where ancestry is not stored but made visible.

Lana Launay’s Kinship series aims to preserve the antique doilies and ancestral lace-like textiles

these textiles have been passed down through generations

up close, the lighting pieces’ surfaces resolve into lace

doilies and stockings are wrapped within stainless steel frameworks

the result is a series of industrial lighting pieces meeting inherited cloth

when unlit, their patterns remain subtle, a historical work of design

the fabric adapts to the size of the lamp

project info:

name: Kinship

artist: Lana Launay | @lanalaunay

photography: Alexander Cooke | @alexandercooke_

The post light sculptures preserve ancestral designs through antique doilies and lace textile appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.