MYBrain

The idea began when Lervik encountered an image of a human brain during a journey in Asia. He was struck by the sculptural character of its folds and by how dramatically that complex surface might receive light. A second thought made the project personal: if he was going to make a brain, it should be his own.

At Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Lervik underwent an MR scan. The resulting sequence of sectional images was translated into a three-dimensional digital model and produced using 3D-printing technology. What had existed as clinical data became a tangible form: recognisably anatomical, yet strangely unfamiliar when placed on the slender stem of a table lamp.

Light changes the object. Unlit, the shade reads almost as a specimen or sculpture, its dense network of ridges holding the eye. Switched on, the same anatomy becomes luminous. The folds create their own pattern of depth, shadow and varying intensity, allowing the structure of the brain to determine the lamp’s visual expression rather than applying decoration to its surface.

The work belongs to a recurring line in Lervik’s practice: technology is not presented as an end in itself, but used when it can make an unexpected idea possible. In 2007, 3D printing was still far from an everyday studio tool. Here it provided the bridge between the immaterial information of a scan and an intimate domestic object — between body, data and light.

That collision gives MYBrain its lasting tension. It is both universal and unrepeatably individual: an organ shared by every person, rendered as the portrait of one. Designers often speak metaphorically about putting themselves into their work; MYBrain makes that phrase literal.

Bukowskis has described MYBrain as the first signature object in Scandinavia created using 3D-printing technology. The lamp is represented in the collection of the Röhsska Museum of Design and Decorative Arts in Gothenburg.