Swedish artist Aia Jüdes has given gnarled tree offshoots a new lease on life by turning them into a series of lights decorated with rainbow LEDs, velvet scrunchies and shining puddles of brass.
The project, which was unveiled as part of Stockholm Design Week, features more than 20 lamps with abstract shapes that variously resemble "little creatures" with fibre optic tentacles or bioluminescent flowers.
Each is made from an outgrowth, called a burl, which forms on the trunks and branches of some trees as a sort of knobbly lump.

These are either hollowed out to form bulbous bowls or stripped of their bark to reveal the spiky interior. They are then propped up on a menagerie of holographic cubes and metallic cones for an aesthetic Jüdes describes as "burls on acid". "I lived in Japan for a while and became really fascinated with the Shintoist idea that different elements of nature actually have a spirit," she told Dezeen.
"From that perspective, a burl is actually not a defect. Each one is unique, like a diamond of the forest. I wanted to reveal the inner magic that I see in these burls and show them in a new light ? pun intended."

Jüdes sourced half of the burls for the collection from flea markets. The other half came from Erling Tällberg, an octogenarian artisan from a fringe subculture of burl carvers who live in the forests of western Sweden.
He is among the few devotees that have carried on this craft, which originated in th...