Lamp in cast aluminium and cast glass
Route – Floor lamp 01.01
2026
Route is an ongoing series of functional sculptural forms situated between collectible design, sculpture, and spatial practice. The collection expands through tables, candle holders, mirrors, and lighting pieces, handcrafted in cast aluminium and sometimes combined with cast glass, mirror glass, or natural elements. Each object is individually handcrafted and conceived as a unique piece or as part of a small limited edition. Rather than forming a closed collection, Route grows as a living system, where each new piece becomes another branch, passage, or point of transformation within an evolving route.
The series is inspired by movement as a continuous process. In Route, form is not a final destination but a state of becoming within the material itself. The objects develop through lines, crossings, and bifurcations, suggesting riverbeds, roots, nervous systems, and traces across an unknown landscape. They do not imitate nature literally; instead, they follow its rhythms, bending, connecting, splitting, and rejoining into an organic geometry shaped by both the behaviour of the material and the gesture of the hand. Each object becomes a sculptural map — an open, non-linear structure that creates passages, thresholds, and connections through material, space, and perception.
The making process is central to the project. Each object begins as a hand-shaped wax model, a soft and responsive material that records pressure, touch, and movement. This temporary form is then translated into cast aluminium through fire and transformation. Associated with industrial production, aluminium is reinterpreted here as a malleable, embodied, almost organic material. It preserves the memory of the wax gesture, as well as traces of heat, gravity, and change, allowing a hard material to enter into dialogue with processes of growth and flow.
Route is especially relevant to the theme because it treats the border not as a line of separation, but as a space of transition, encounter, and exchange. The works exist across several borders at once: between design and sculpture, function and
contemplation, the artificial and the natural, the human gesture and non-human systems of growth. In this sense, the boundary becomes a generative condition, where limits shape form and create new possibilities of relation.
Through Route, the border becomes a living zone of contact. It is where industrial material begins to behave organically, where function opens into reflection, and where the object becomes a landscape. The project invites the viewer to reconsider boundaries not as endings, but as thresholds through which new forms of coexistence can emerge.
Sofia Karnukaeva is a Barcelona-based artist and architect working across collectible design, sculpture, and spatial practice. Through metal, ceramic, glass, and mixed media, she develops sculptural forms that move between function
and narrative, domestic space and organic matter. Her practice explores adaptation, material transformation, and the relationship between body, object, and environment, treating each work as a fragment of a larger spatial condition.
Since moving to Barcelona in 2022, she has established her studio and developed projects presented by international galleries and shown in contexts such as Collect in London, Collectible Design Fair, Madrid Design Festival, Paris Design Week, 3daysofdesign, and Maison&Objet, among others.