Vapor inflated plastic lighting collection by Pieke Bergmans

VAPOR blown-plastic lighting collection by Pieke Bergmans

Dutch Design Week 2013: Amsterdam designer Pieke Bergmans developed a technique similar to glass blowing to create these plastic lighting installations (+ slideshow).

Pieke Bergmans experimented with heating and rapidly inflating the PVC plastic so the final form is partly left open to chance.

"I don't like to design as a designer and be very precise about how things should look," Bergmans told Dezeen. "I prefer that shapes grow into their natural environment, so the only thing I decide is to add more or less air or maybe a few colours, time or material."

One group of objects have been extruded into twisting, rippled pipes with a light bulb illuminating them from within.

Another series is made by blowing air into the plastic until it stretches into a delicate, translucent tube at one end.

Bergmans explained that the collection is called VAPOR because "the lighting objects fade away into nothing, like a gas that seems to dissolve."

The collection follows Bergmans' previous experiments with glass blowing, which included her hand-blown organically-shaped light bulbs and a series of polished bronze objects with blown-glass lamps spilling out of them designed in collaboration with Studio Job.

VAPOR was presented in an old pump house in Eindhoven as part of Dutch Design Week, with the first series displayed nestled amongst the pipes and the billowing second series suspended in the central double-height space.

Here's a brief project description from Pieke Bergmans:

Vapor

This time Bergmans did not blow glass but plastic instead! As usual she has been exploring new techniques and it resulted again in a stunning body of work. Something that we have never seen. Six meters high, fragile mystical lighting-objects, hanging down from the ceiling. A translucent and solid body that fades away to almost no substance. Illuminated with light.

VAPOR refers to a liquid or solid state where the same substance at a high temperature turns into a gas phase. It’s beautiful, magical and seems almost from a different planet. Either angles or ghosts, I am not sure, but this time for sure they exist. They are real and can be touched.