As part of the Design Mart exhibition at the Design Museum, I was commissioned to create a series of lights to be suspended down the central stairwell. At the time, I had just begun working with found spectacles and was fascinated by the visual strategies used by eyewear retailers to present new collections. In many displays, glasses and sunglasses are illuminated from behind to draw attention to the subtle variations in lens colour, tint, and transparency, as well as to showcase the refinement of the materials used in their construction.

For this commission, I wanted to adapt that commercial language of display but redirect it toward a curated selection of vintage frames—both prescription spectacles and sunglasses. By carefully choosing frames with varying hues, lens strengths, and histories, I assembled the collection into a layered composition. The double layer of lenses allowed light to pass through multiple planes of colour, heightening the depth, brilliance, and tonal interplay of the materials.

The resulting piece evokes the aesthetic of a Victorian natural history display—specifically, the glass vitrines in which collections of exotic butterflies were once meticulously arranged. In this contemporary reinterpretation, the spectacles act as delicate specimens, preserved and illuminated, their former use transformed into a luminous tableau that celebrates both craft and memory.