FERMI began in mid 2025, as an extension of my studio practice. I'm a painter by training. My work has always moved between images and objects. Before FERMI existed, I'd already made a few sculptural lamps as one-off artworks: slow, labor-intensive pieces that took weeks to build and were shown and sold as singular objects. They worked as lighting, but they were conceived as sculpture first.

I started paying closer attention to contemporary lighting studios working in 3D printing, places like Wooj, Crème Atelier, and Outil.li. That got me interested in translating that sculptural language into something more repeatable, without losing its character. I already had the printers and the software skills, so I treated it like a new body of work: prototyping, iterating, refining the forms.

Most 3D-printed lamps put the attention on the shade, since the technology is good at thin, intricate shells. I wanted the base to carry the form instead. Each one comes out of a dialogue between organic volume and playful geometric interruption, biomorphic but grounded. Stable, tactile, materially confident. Not overly decorative, not terribly fragile.

Every lamp is dimmable with a simple physical dial. No apps, no remotes, no programmed behavior. Just a hand on a simple dial, turning the light up or down.

The name comes from the Fermi Paradox: the question of why, in a universe this vast, we haven't found any evidence of other life. Speculative, elegant, a little unsettling. Those are qualities I like in an object that's supposed to feel alive without spelling it out.

FERMI launches with three forms, each in a range of colors. Every lamp is 3D-printed and hand-assembled by me in my Brooklyn studio, and fully tested before going out the door.

These lamps sit somewhere between a functional object and a sculpture you happen to plug in. If you choose to live with one, I hope it reveals itself slowly, over time.

Jeremy

My personal artwork can be viewed at jeremyolson.com