In a house in Istanbul there were portraits drawn by a teenager who wanted to become a hyperrealistic painter. Bade Erol worked hardest on the eyes, “the most realistic way,” until “they were literally speaking to you.” She put so much into them that she kept them for herself rather than hanging them on the wall. That intensity never left her. It just found another form.

She has been working with light for around ten years, moving between Barcelona and Istanbul, making lamps, chandeliers and objects in glass, metal, ceramic and textile for collectors, galleries and furniture companies. A piece often starts with something heavy, a feeling that stays with her for days, sometimes weeks, before it finds a shape. She has her own way of putting it: “explosion, death, birth, everything is coming to the same.” When it comes, it comes fast. She wakes in the middle of the night and starts, and within two or three days she has called the people she needs and the factories that can make it. What she is working out in those days is the form: which light, which material, how many layers of colour and transparency it will take to carry what was there.

For her, making is a language. “It’s a way of speaking to the world and other people,” she says, and “a response to, I think, love.” She doesn’t need to take it apart afterwards. “I just need to take it out with a form, and I don’t need to know in depth.” The intensity is only one part of it. The rest is curiosity, and the pleasure of trying things. “I’m questioning all the time,” she says, and that’s how she starts a day. She is obsessed with niche perfumes and follows how the notes change on the skin over hours. “I love the process of the notes, how it differs.” She is teaching herself to code. When she can’t make anything she swims, or trains, which she does almost every day.

She was a very curious kid. “I never looked at something and accepted the form. I always questioned why and how.” In class she drew the people around her instead of listening, and her first exhibition came out of those drawings. A teacher noticed and spoke to her family. Her parents, she says, “just let me be.” Art was already in the family. Her grandmother, an artist and fashion designer who lived in Italy, was the person who brought Murano glass to Turkey, setting up the trade between the Murano factories and Turkish lighting manufacturers. Her father taught her most of what she knows about art and design.

At 16 she went to England for her A-levels, in Slough, outside London, studying fine art, textiles and graphics. She was set on painting until her fine art tutor told her she was “very, uh, geometrical” and suggested product design. Bade is dyslexic and had been afraid of mathematics her whole life. She took the advice. “Whatever is missing in you, you actually fulfill as a human being in a different way.” England, she says, valued her perspective and asked her to find her own method. “My career began in London, which was a breaking point.”

Before Central Saint Martins she took a year out to study pastry at Le Cordon Bleu, because she had always wanted to be either a cook or an artist. She was the youngest there, surrounded by people over thirty and forty. The kitchen stayed with her. The way she had learned to work sugar turned out to be close to how glass is made, and she brought it with her, layering colour into glass without breaking it. “So, actually, everything is kind of interlinked together.” You can see it in Mons, a lamp that rises like a mound of glass bubbles, made in clear glass and in a version flecked amber and black.

Mons

She studied product design at Central Saint Martins and has worked in lighting for around ten years. In 2019 she quit her job and opened her own studio. Her method starts before any material is chosen. “Light is the soul of the object.” She decides on the soul first, “and then I decide on the material that will shape that soul.” Underneath every piece are the same questions: what makes an object art, what makes it design, what makes it something you simply buy, and who decides. For her the answers aren’t fixed. They come from how people live with things: the lamp switched on every evening, the object kept on a table for years, the meaning someone gives to a piece and the small rituals that grow around it. “Everything is the relations, like semiotics with object and us.” And, more simply: “We want to be understood by objects.”

Right now the answer is rawness. “I like raw, raw stuff right now.” She leaves metal in its own colour and pairs glass with materials from nature, working with translucency. Folie Verte is a long sheet of green textile that undulates above a dining table, and lit from inside it shows every fold and woven fibre. “My actual form is feminine, but my material choice is masculine.” She used to work in more colour. Now she calls herself neutral, and says she wants clarity.

She doesn’t treat failure as a lesson she learned once. She budgets for it. On an early mass-manufacturing job, 300 lamps for a company, she had to produce 900 glasses to get 300 good ones, and the client was never going to pay for the rest. “If you can’t accept the failure, you cannot build anything.” She says it plainly: “I like failure.” She manufactures in the Czech Republic, China, Turkey and Italy, and once hired a factory that makes bathroom porcelain to mould the pieces of a six-metre chandelier. Yes, she’s an artist and a business woman as well.

The hardest part was showing the work. “You’re literally putting your emotions into a form, and then you’re showcasing, you’re like, oh, this is how I feel.” Then someone tells you it looks like something else. She started working with private clients at 21 and 22, and they would tell her they had expected someone older. They wanted to be part of the process, and she let them in too far. She came out of it with two rules. “Nothing is personal.” And “saying no and putting your barriers because your creativity is your creativity and you don’t need to convince anyone of anything.”

She doesn’t work only alone. With Leni Piëch, founder of Sphaer, she co-designed Calliope, Aglaea and Phibia, pendants where glass, ceramic and brass meet through colour and geometry. Every exhibition and every client conversation also becomes research for her, a record of how people respond to what she makes. And she is reaching further. Alongside the studio she is now building something around dining and food, closer to a community than a product, taking what she knows about how objects shape people’s habits to the table, where people eat together. She won’t call the studio a business. “It’s a way of living for me.” What has changed is how she stands next to the work. “Now I am listening more than before.”

Folie Verte

Folie Verte Detail

Calliope - designed in collaboration with Sphaer

Written and published by Pauline Garcin.