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Soane Britain launches a limited-edition collection of wall lights in collaboration with the London-based Japanese artist Kuniko Maeda. The lights are loosely inspired by Karl Blossfeldt’s precise botanical photographs, working with paper from one of the last handmade paper makers in Britain, The Paper Foundation, based in the Lake District.

The delicate shades of the ‘Mallow’ and ‘Dragon Head’ wall lights incorporate the traditional Japanese technique of kakishibu, painted with the dye from unripe persimmons. This mellow, amber-coloured pigment is carefully applied by hand to add rigidity to the paper’s natural fibres and will age and fade beautifully over time, enhancing the inherent beauty of the paper.

Soane is proud to champion British crafts, celebrating the enthusiasm and pride in workmanship shared by all its makers. Transparent making processes are central to Soane’s ethos, demanding first-hand knowledge of every craftsperson with whom it collaborates, to ensure that traditional, often endangered craft skills — like the critically endangered craft of making paper by hand — survive into the next generation.

Visit Soane’s Pimlico Road showroom to trace Kuniko’s sculptural paper wall lights back to their origins, from the making of the material from which they are made by The Paper Foundation to the painstaking techniques used by Kuniko to create their unfurling forms.