*Light carries information from stars to the cells in our bodies* by Studio Vit, installed at Etage Projects in Copenhagen (photograph: Annabel Elston).

Previously, the work of Studio Vit has been pure and primary in its form. Designers Helena Jonasson and Veronica Dagnert have revelled in the reduction of material, with their lighting and objects elegantly balancing orbs atop cones and suspending spheres from cylinders, with no extraneous detail bar the interplay of simple geometries. Across Vit’s catalogue, each design has been pared back to its basic spatial constituents. “We almost always work with geometrical volume only,” Dagnert explains. “There’s no faffing about. The pieces reduce exactly to what they are.”

It is an approach that, in 2014, saw Modern Design Review celebrate the studio as leading exemplars of “a new minimalism that tempers simplicity with sensibility”, with projects such as Cone lights and Marble lights delicately arranging materials and forms with an ease and directness reflected in the literalness of the works’ titles: there are no prizes, for instance, for guessing the shape of the Cone lights. In the studio’s most recent work, however, things are different.

Light carries information from stars to the cells in our bodies is a new collection and exhibition of aluminium and plaster works on display at the Etage Projects gallery in Copenhagen. Elements of Jonasson and Dagnert’s familiar aesthetic remain on display in the new pieces – there are polished conical and cubic bases to floor lamps, for example, as well as slender tubular legs and stalks – but these simple forms have been paired with aluminium castings that bobble, bubble and boil over in organic profusion, bringing an air of eccentricity and mystery to the simplicity of Vit’s work. “These very organic forms are the absolute opposite of strict geometrical volume, which is what makes it work,” Dagnaert explains.

The new organic forms have not been designed in the classical sense of the term. These elements in Vit’s designs are aluminium and marble-blasted plaster castings of meteorites and fulgurites, the latter being the natural blossoms of fused material that are created when lightning strikes the ground. The erratic geometry of the fulgurite – paired with the combination of Vit’s minimalism and the natural profusion of their found forms – is a fitting symbol for the project as a whole, which aims to explore the parallels and commonalities between natural phenomena at both a micro and macro scale. “It all started,” Dagnaert notes, “with us having a conversation about interconnectedness.”

At the heart of Light carries information from stars to the cells in our bodies is an interest in the natural laws that shape the universe. Running around the wall of the gallery in which Vit’s collection is installed at Etage, for example, are a series of written statements, set out in small black type. “The cells in our bodies / come from exploded stars / Two dying stars held together with gravitation / Remains of asteroids and comets create falling stars / interplanetary dust”. The texts are snippets drawn from books of astrophysics and connected fields (and subjected to the same kind of editorial reduction that Vit typically applies to physical matter) and describe the processes and forces through which all phenomena in the universe, be they terrestrial or interstellar, are born, burn, expire and renew. “The idea was never to produce a text that was informative, but to put the viewer in a certain frame of mind, or to have the same expression in the words that we wanted in the objects,” Dagnaert says. “It’s just little bits from here and there,” adds Jonasson, “but I think it’s calming and has a certain quietness.”

Vit’s previous work may have been simple in form, but the studio’s output has always been complex and elusive in its messaging and connotations. Their Marble lights, for instance, are elegant and clean, but imbued with an air of tension given their suspension of fragile glass orbs beneath heavy weights of marble. Light carries information from stars to the cells in our bodies similarly trades in allusion and connotation, rather than evoking any single issue with precision or clarity. “We never intended to make a full representation, as such,” Dagaert explains, with the studio preferring instead to deal in suggestion and provocation in order to raise questions around “the Western idea that we are self-contained as individuals.” In contrast to this conception, the designers argue, they hope to generate feelings of connection between all forms of life, as expressed in one of the objects – an aluminium casting of a seashell. “The structure of how galaxies form is mirrored in the formation of shells,” Dagaert explains. “There was something very beautiful about how large phenomena are often mirrored in smaller things in life.”

This kind of mirroring is at play throughout the wider collection. The fulgurite pieces, for instance, were selected for the manner in which they offer “an imprint of something that you cannot hold onto, and which exists just for a second,” Dagaert explains. “To have that as a permanent object was something we thought was very beautiful.” Whereas in the past Vit have explored this sense of ephemerality through reduction of material form, in Light carries information from stars to the cells in our bodies this interest is expanded through the inclusion of text, as well as the tension between Vit’s aesthetic and the natural phenomena it has been placed in dialogue with. “It feels like we have pushed our practice a step further compared to before,” Daggaert explains. “With the text and the organic form, it’s not as if it’s completely new ground, but it’s a continuation of what we’ve explored before. I would like to think we have pushed a little further.”

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