Meet city.girls.xp, the Anonymous Duo Behind the Art World’s Favourite Lamps

city.girls.xp is an anonymous artist duo making unique lamps that London’s art scene is swooning over. Set up by two artist besties who transformed their shared tastes into something productive, they present their sculptures in chicly curated single-evening collection drops where artists, gallerists and creatives quickly snap them up. Magpie-like, their works are formed from (often shiny) found materials sourced from eBay and charity shops, turning abandoned (sometimes kitsch) objects into elegant pieces that reference design movements from pretty Art Nouveau to pared-back minimalist modernism and cheeky, clashing postmodernism. Their most recent project? Being commissioned to design a large-scale ceiling light for a notable young gallerist’s New York apartment, which they presented in Hackney last December. When I met them on a dark Sunday evening in their London studio – where I previewed several gorgeous, luminously glowing new works in progress – we spoke about the foundations of their collaboration, the Victorian novel behind their name, and their dream future project.

How did you meet and begin collaborating?

We met through friends. We would spend time in each other’s studios and talk about the work we were making and things we had collected – often without clear intent! This spilled out of the studio too, and we would constantly send each other clothes, objects, art we were obsessed with. We realised there were distinct patterns in what we were drawn to. We both collected a lot of stuff we were fond of which almost existed outside of our individual practices. One day we decided to try to make something functional out of this stuff. We shifted from sending each other skirts and shoes to knicknacks and trash (which has destroyed our Vinted algorithms).

Curiously, do you consider it an art practice or a design practice?

We’re very much artists who make lamps rather than lamp designers. No shade. For us, it’s refreshing to work within the parameters of usability. A lamp has to be practical: it has to stand up and emit a nice light, whereas art can be anything. Our way of working is also very sporadic and chaotic – a lot of it comes down to chance – so it feels especially rewarding when something ends up both functional and somewhat cohesive.

Do you remember your first lamp?

Our first attempt was combining a diamante pencil organiser with a metal hoop but we didn’t even finish it! The real first one was Sabine. It was made from part of a chrome chair that we chopped up, and the top was part of a fibreglass model boat. It felt kind of magical when we switched it on: it lit up and you could see the brushstrokes in the fibreglass.

You mentioned to me earlier that you like this element of surprise.

We like it when something unexpected happens. With most of them, it’s nice when you switch the lamp on and it creates an interesting light – when it highlights something, or changes colour. For instance, with Raquel, when we combined a particular fabric from a top and draped it, it fell in such a beautiful way. When we were making Jasmine, we liked the   warm glow the tupperware gave and then how it illuminated the individual butterflies. With Paris, the mesh funnel we ended up using as a shade cast a spiralling lattice pattern on the wall that we hadn’t anticipated. Adding light to an object is quite a simple gesture, but it can enhance certain qualities and transform it into something unexpected.

I’m interested in your influences and, by extension, how you’d describe your aesthetic. There’s clearly a modernist thread in many of the lamps, particularly in the recurring use of stainless steel. But there are also elements of Art Nouveau and Pop, and something obviously quite postmodern in the way different eras, styles and materials are juxtaposed. There’s a sharpness and a prettiness, but also a sense of humour – which feels quite deliberate.

We’re drawn to all of those things, and you see them already embedded in everyday objects. A table leg, for instance, could read as Art Nouveau or mid-century depending on how it’s adapted. That language is already present in these repurposed items – things people have used and lived with. A pink steering wheel might feel like something out of a Kylie Minogue video, but we can push it in another direction. We bring together old things and new things, so the lamps end up feeling slightly out of time. We’re also not starting from scratch, we work with what we’ve found and all of the design choices which were already there in the objects themselves. 

There’s also a sense of restraint in the work – of knowing when to stop. With sculpture, there can be a lot of labour and energy involved, but ideally the final object feels effortless.

Exactly. You want it to feel like they are almost doing it on their own (rather than as the result of our labour). We are quite conscious of not disrupting the existing forms too much. 

The name – city.girls.xp – is quite fun. How did you come up with it? 

We spent ages trying to come up with a name. We were talking to some friends who had just finished reading A City Girl by Margaret Harkness. It’s a Victorian novel about a woman who’s seduced and abandoned and forced to survive in the harsh conditions of East London. The book describes the noise and detritus of the streets in a really vivid way, and that felt connected to the lamps – the idea of working with scraps, or with what’s around you. The protagonist has a terrible time, but the way Harkness writes about the rubbish and clutter around her is quite poetic.

Speaking of detritus, I see you as quite magpie-like in the way you collect materials that eventually become your works. I’m sure your eBay watch lists are pretty amazing. 

We’ve got similar eye brains or something, we’ll both look at something and be like *nods head*.  But there are sometimes certain objects that one of us wants more than the other and we almost have to almost battle it out and give our reasons… We’re working with found materials that have been used often, mass produced, and designed by someone else, but something everything slots together elegantly. There are things that just obviously do recur because they are kind of abundant, like Chrome, we can’t help but incorporate into the works because it’s everywhere, and it’s also nice and shiny. Sometimes things fall into place in quite uncanny ways. When we were making Clarissa, we had this perforated tube that we wanted to cover in rubber, but we couldn’t figure out how to do it. Then we stepped outside the flat and there was a pile of motorbike inner tubes on the street. We brought them back to the studio and one of them fit perfectly.

Talk a bit more about the drop model you have been showing them. They’ve been selling quite well, right? And what I find quite interesting is it seems like art gallerists seem to love them. 

We make the lamps in collections, quite simply because of the way they are made. We work on several lamps at once, as they come together quite often through chance, or trial and error. Gradually, we build up a group of around eight. We aren’t too strategic with the drops – we wish we were! We like people to see them in person before buying them, so it makes sense to have them all in one room. They can look quite different in real life: scale, surface texture, and the quality of light are all hard to convey in images.

I forgot to ask about naming the individual lamps and where those names come from. Because there’s a particular kind of attitude in the naming… 

Usually, we name them once they’re finished. We look at them and think: what kind of personality does this one have? Katy, just felt like a Katy – but with a ‘y’. A big difference. Raquel was named after Raquel from Vanderpump Rules. It’s really about the attitude they give off. The name sort of completes the piece.

What would be your dream project or collaboration?

We mainly just want to keep making lamps – we’ve been doing this for less than two years. It would be great to work at a larger scale more often. It would be exciting to be wholly responsible for the lighting in a particular space. lf someone asked us to do the lighting for an entire home, for example, we’d probably approach it quite differently. We think some would have to be more restrained, and others could be a bit crazier.

Someone should totally ask you to do that! 

Agreed!



Feature image: Raquel and Tara. Courtesy city.girls.xp