Designing one-of-a-kind lamps was never what Dez Ryan, 42, planned to be doing, years after graduating from college with an art history degree and from graduate school with a concentration in sculpture.
True to her schooling, the native Californian, who hopscotched her way across the country and landed in Manhattan, began to sculpt room-size, cast-concrete environmental pieces. But she found herself increasingly frustrated with her art and so she searched for another medium.
Almost overnight, she says, she tried her hand at taking apart and reassembling lamps she found in thrift shops into new, elegant designs. “There really wasn’t any light bulb that came on and told me to make lamps,” Ryan says. “It was more curiosity at trying something different.”
Nevertheless, what first resulted nearly five years ago had a sculptural, almost totemic quality. It was a table lamp made from recycled metal and glass and architectural pieces strung on steel tubing like pop beads. A friend who taught her to wire lamps and became her technical consultant loved the finished design so much he bought it for $50 and gave it as a wedding present. Before long, Ryan was asked to make another, then another, and was sought out by high-end design stores.
Today her studio in the East Village of Manhattan is filled end-to-end with lamps, parts of lamps and shades that she scrounges at flea markets and old-house sales and from trash bins. “I’ve bought hundreds and hundreds of lamps and taken them apart.” She also has been known to cannibalize her less-favorite lamps.
One problem with success, however, has been that the stores that carry Ryan’s lamps and the shoppers who’ve gotten to recognize her style have begun to request duplicates of designs they’ve considered buying or spotted in room settings in shelter magazines.
“I hate to tell people that I made that lamp two years ago and don’t have the parts to make another. Mine are originals,” she says. “That’s the joy of what I’m doing. To try to reproduce any would destroy the creativity, which is also why I don’t work on commission. I need to let the parts tell me what to do.”
Resources
From left: “Greenie Mushroom” small table lamp, $330; “Rococo Cherubim” table torchiere, $895; Rougami Sprout” floor torchiere, $1,950; all available at Motif, 1101 W. Webster Ave., Chicago.
