A Guardian
Mair Cook’s night feed light was part of The Aram Gallery’s Adaptations exhibition (image: Aram).
“My weaving feels very attached to my motherhood,” textile artist Mair Cook says, explaining how she originally learned to weave after her first daughter was born. “It was a way that I could regain a little bit of myself and focus on something that wasn't nappies and child stuff.” Though Cook initially used her weaving practice to develop her identity outside of motherhood, it felt increasingly disjointed to be separating these two parts of her life. “It feels so natural to want to do stuff about [my daughter] and to focus on her,” Cook says. “[Parenthood] is a big part of a lot of people's lives, so why do we have to put it in a little secret box?”
So when Cook received a brief for Adaptations, an exhibition hosted at London’s Aram Gallery, only 10 weeks after giving birth to her second child, she knew she wanted to make something related to her new baby. “I wasn’t really capable of thinking about anything else at that stage,” she says. The show has been created in partnership with Swiss furniture brand USM, and its concept was developed during a visit to the company’s factory in Münsingen, where engineers had adapted the brand’s Haller system — a modular collection of storage and display solutions — to create bespoke pieces to assist them in their daily work. Cook was one of 10 designers tasked with creating a piece that they needed for their home or studio which would take inspiration from the system while deviating from its traditional functions.
Like USM’s engineers, many of the designers made furniture to complement their working life: Livia Lauber designed a bookshelf on wheels, for example, while Rolstudio created a cosy nook with a seat, bookshelf and a swing-out desk, and Mitre & Mondays made fold-out stools for eating meals together in their workshop. What Cook needed most, however, was a lamp for breastfeeding at night, a ritual which felt especially meaningful since her daughter had spent the first month of her life in a neonatal intensive care unit. “You start to lose trust in yourself when everything is so watched and monitored,” she says. “When I got the brief I was still establishing routines and building up my confidence again.”
Cook’s design features a drawer with a steel frame embedded with dimmable lights (part of USM’s Haller-E collection) that glow through a delicate lampshade woven directly onto the frame. Cook chose a hazy, op art inspired pattern that captures the bleariness of waking up in the twilight hours, and colours that mirror the parent-child relationship, with a “sensible and utilitarian” khaki grey colour spiked through with a zesty lemon colour that is “a little bit childish but not too baby nursery”.
The interplay between these two familial roles echoes throughout the form. “The fragility of the weave and the sturdiness of the structure speaks to the mother-baby bond, the strong one and the vulnerable one,” Cook says. “But there’s a duality to it, because it was a vulnerable time for me and she was my strength.” Unlike other products for babies which have a short lifespan, Cook sees the potential for the lamp to evolve into a reading light as her daughter matures, and to provide lasting solace for both mother and child. “[The lamp] hasn’t got its full personality yet,” Cook says. “But it will be like a guardian – a comforting, cosy companion for my daughter, but also for me, as a memory of this time.”
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown
Photographs Jack Orton, Aram