Glass defies convention in Lampposts by the design collective JAM at Galerie kreo

Paris-based Galerie kreo will present Lampposts, a design exhibition by London-based design collective JAM, comprising Joe Halligan, Dan Waterstone and Adam Willis, on view from October 30 – December 23, 2026. Marking the collective’s first exhibition with the contemporary design gallery, the showcase will bring together a series of glass lamps that challenge conventional ideas of material, scale and function.

Developed over two years of research and production at Cirva (International Glass and Visual Arts Research Centre) in Marseille, the works reinterpret the familiar urban lamppost through the unexpected use of hand-blown glass. “We believe in bringing character and personality to the built environment and daily life”, the designers note in the official release, “and imagining richer, stranger ways of inhabiting the world.”

Standing between 2.2 and 3.5 metres tall, the lamps transform an everyday object into a sculptural presence, balancing structural clarity with an apparent sense of fragility, made in flushed colours like pink, green, lilac and blue. “Created in sections, in transparent glass, these totemic objects appear both familiar and strange…The construction can be read through the density of colour, which deepens where sections overlap, strongest at joints and edges and from the shadows they cast in the space,” the design gallery notes.

The lighting collection includes several configurations: from slender stems supporting a single globe to designs featuring two or four globes, alongside versions with conical or bulb-shaped light sources. Every component is individually hand-blown and assembled by Civra’s cold-working team. Variations in thickness and the nuances of the handmade process ensure that no two lamps are exactly alike, lending each a distinct character.

“The totemic lamps JAM has created at Cirva for kreo have a surreal presence in the interior space. They are too tall, too fine, too unlikely, yet still readable as the civic archetypes from which they derive,” Galerie kreo concludes.