Behind Elyse Graham’s joyful candy-colored Prism Meta pendant light is a design practice that is rigorous, deeply thoughtful — and often frustrating. It’s that tension between frustration and reflection/precision/fastidiousness which makes her work worthwhile for Graham.
The way she tells it, she “collaborates” with her materials, orchestrating a “controlled chaos.” As one would expect with chaos, things don’t always go her way. In fact, the rubber used to make the Prism Meta pendant was born from a colossal failure. “We had worked with rubber a few years prior to creating the Meta Pendants. The rubber proved to be too flexible for how we originally intended to use it, but absolutely perfect for the pendants.” Graham expects such fiascos from her medium of choice, resin — a notoriously finicky substance that she treats with reverence.
For her Meta series, her primary reference was traditional stained glass, seen through a distinctly contemporary lens. The pendant’s panels are cast from a crystal-clear liquid rubber that is hand pigmented and poured into thin sheets. Because they are poured by hand, the panels possess a beautiful unevenness that creates subtle color gradations. They are then fused together with opaque, hand-pigmented epoxy resin, which acts like the lead lines in classic stained-glass windows.
The true magic happens when you flick the switch. “I love the transformation that occurs when the pendant goes from unlit to lit,” Graham says. Unlit, the fixture is a sculptural mosaic of interacting hues, encouraging the viewer to walk around it. When illuminated, it transforms entirely. The rubber panels emit a radiant glow, while the opaque epoxy joints deepen, creating a sharp contrast. It’s “like having two pieces in one,” says Graham.
As a Los Angeles native manipulating color and perception, Graham feels a deep kinship with the trailblazers of the 1960s California Light and Space movement — particularly Helen Pashgian, who began experimenting with resin more than four decades before her. Reading a recent interview in which the octogenarian Pashgian admitted that the substance still presented her with fresh challenges, “I almost laughed out loud,” she says, noting that resin “is endlessly seductive and mysterious. It’s a material of infinite possibility — and infinite problems to solve.”
By embracing resin’s inevitable frustrations, Graham transforms missteps into next steps, leading to literal and metaphorical light-bulb moments. Today, the pendant stands as a testament to that creative perseverance. The Meta series embodies the ingenuity required to turn “infinite problems” into moments of pure wonder.
