karl monies shapes inherited craft into glowing fungi and symbolic vessels

karl monies enters other circle with luminous fungi

Inside other circle’s Copenhagen setting during 3daysofdesign, Karl Monies’ mushroom-like lamps seemed to grow from the room itself, their coppery caps rising from beds of moss and lichen as light gathered beneath each rim. The pieces sat low to the floor in metal trays, with cables left in view and surfaces marked by rivets, seams, oxidized blues, and earthy browns.

Across the installation, the Danish artist and designer brought together a language that has long shaped his practice. His objects move between furniture and sculpture, between something useful and something harder to name. A lamp still gives light, but here it also behaves like a forest fragment, a handmade instrument, and a strange domestic creature.

craft as a changing language

Presented as part of other circle’s cross-disciplinary platform, the work of designer Karl Monies fits into a wider conversation around craft as something alive, mutable, and open to new forms. His practice spans ceramics, furniture, painting, and jewelry, though the works in Copenhagen placed light and landscape at the center. The mushroom forms drew from his Bonum Lumen series, first developed for his 2024 solo exhibition Macro at Etage Projects.

The lamps carry the physical evidence of their making. Faceted metal sheets meet at visible joins, small rivets trace the body like a drawn line, and oxidized color settles unevenly across the surfaces. Some caps lean, others widen into low shelters. Their awkwardness gives them presence, as though each piece had adjusted itself while growing.

from forest floor to gallery object

At his Macro solo show in Copenhagen, the moss bases changed the way the lamps were read. Instead of standing as isolated design objects, they formed small ecosystems, with soft green surfaces pressing against hammered metal and warm light. The gallery floor became a staged terrain, part woodland and part workshop.

That tension has become central to Monies’ material world. His objects often begin with familiar types, such as vessels, lamps, urns, bottles, or decorative forms, then stretch them until they feel slightly out of time. The mushroom lamps lean into that feeling. They suggest folklore, fungi, shelter, and decay, while their construction remains plainly visible.

vessels, symbols, and inherited forms

Monies is also known for his ceramic vessels, many of which combine glazed stoneware with cork and patterned climbing rope. These containers borrow from different eras and cultures, with references that can move from sake bottles to modernist design objects. They rarely feel like direct quotations. Instead, they gather fragments into new bodies.

His earlier Arcana series, shown at Etage Projects in 2019, brought this symbolic dimension into sharper focus. The exhibition drew on magic, tarot, and ritual instruments, treating objects as tools for thought as much as things to use. In this sense, the vessel becomes a carrier of memory, belief, and material experiment. 

traditional craft, distorted

Karl Monies offers a view of craft as inheritance in motion. His work does not treat tradition as something sealed away. It picks up older material languages and lets them distort, glow, and grow into stranger forms.

The mushroom lamps at other circle make that position tangible. They hold together metalwork, landscape, light, and hand-built irregularity, all while resisting a single category. In Monies’ world, craft is a way to keep objects open. It lets them carry traces of the past while leaving room for rituals, uses, and meanings still taking shape.

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project info:

designer: Karl Monies | @karl_monies

This article is part of designboom’s Crafting the Future chapter, exploring what it means to be a maker in today’s world and the future of craftsmanship. Discover more related stories here.