A STUDY 003 / Piece 05

Metal has accompanied Jimmy Kamhieh Loutfi through two quite different lives. As a mechanical engineer, he understood it through properties and performance; later, through jewellery, he began to see the same material as something capable of holding memory, emotion and sentimental meaning. For A STUDY 003, Kamhieh Loutfi makes another shift. Moving beyond the silver he knows intimately, he turned to bronze, and to a scale less familiar to his hands.

The resulting candle holder began as a simple cylinder, gradually interrupted by an eye, a nose and a mouth — fragments drawn from Loutfi’s ongoing study of human anatomy. Sculpted digitally and then translated through prototyping and casting, the form had to adapt to the physical demands of bronze: thicknesses changed, depths were reconsidered, details refined.

Patination came last, and altered the object most profoundly. Its darkened surface lends the bronze an apparent age, while settling differently around each feature. As light moves across it, the anatomy emerges and recedes. A familiar household object remains, but with another presence just beneath its surface.