Maker Monday: An Aspire Exclusive Interview With Erin Lorek

Having worked in a variety of entertainment venues, Erin Lorek has cultivated a fascination with the substance of light. At her new design studio, Lorekform, she combines her passion for lighting with manual artistry to create glass lamps and lighting fixtures. Lorek transfers her experience in design and gaffing to a creation process utilizing iron and glass, ultimately delivering a product that both illuminates and provides any environment with a unique piece of art. Introducing this week’s Maker Monday, Erin Lorek.

Lorek’s background in live theatre inspired her Surround pendant, a minimalistic design, akin to a ghost light, that captures light in a reflective glass disc.

Andrew Joseph: You’re the newest Crayola color. What color are you and why?
Erin Lorek: “Luminance.” I work like the highlighter in your makeup bag. Honestly, a large-scale version of this would be great; I could make everything in my apartment fresh and dewy.

Andrew: If you weren’t a designer, you’d be a…?
Erin: I would absolutely love to be a model builder or storyboard artist. Fingers crossed either of those still happen.

The Beacon pendant, a delicate fixture in iron-cast glass, was Lorek’s first project and inspired her later designs.

Andrew: If you could be any animal in the world, what animal would you be and why?
Erin: We all agree the answer is dolphin, right? Like is there anyone out there who doesn’t want to be living their best ocean life?

Andrew: Do you get your eight hours a night? – what is your schedule like?
Erin: Most of my 20s and 30s were spent working on live event production which has a nonsensically rough schedule. I’d often have to go to work at 2 or 3am. Now that I have the opportunity to sleep consistently I do everything I can to get the most out of it and sleep 7-8 hours a night.

Lorekform’s Surround pendant is adjustable and comes in a number of styles, providing a polished, quirky feature to any environment.

Andrew: What about your design style has shifted post-quarantine?
Erin: I’ve been pulling everything inward towards a place of hyper-focus, only thinking about the work in front of me. Up to this point, I spent way too much time worrying about how a piece might be produced. So far I’m enjoying the freedom.

Andrew: What would you like to be remembered for?
Erin: Ideas on the brutalist nature of light, the materiality of it.

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About The Maker | Erin Lorek is a lighting designer currently working in glass. She received a degree in theatrical lighting design from West Chester University and has been freelancing in the NYC live entertainment industry as a designer, gaffer and rigger since 2004. Her desire to study the materiality of light as it forms the object led her to develop her iron and glass processing 2017 at Penland School of Crafts. In this practice Erin creates a glass that gives ambient light an opportunity to react in both expected and unexpected ways. Large iron plates, for use as tools in the glass shop, begin as a slab of wet clay impressed with a texture chosen for its potentially refractive pattern. Through a simple lost-wax process the clay is translated to wax, then sand, and then finally, iron. Each step of the way these materials are pushed to their limits, forcing aberrations into each layer that weave their own narrative around the original impression. When the lenses are poured we are rewarded with beautifully imperfect pieces of cast glass that both collect and refract the light.

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