Lira Table Lamp is a minimalist alabaster lamp created by India-based studio MUGEN. Alabaster has been carved into functional objects for millennia – from Roman oil lamps to Giorgio Santa Maria Novella’s apothecary vessels – but its role in contemporary collectible lighting has undergone a quiet resurgence, driven by designers drawn to its singular quality: stone that transmits light. The Lira, part of MUGEN’s debut BARRAQ collection, works precisely within this tradition while grounding it in a distinctly geological imagination.

The form draws from lava clouds – those billowing, rounded masses that form at the interface of molten rock and atmosphere. The lamp’s silhouette is structured as a compact cluster of lobed volumes, each curve pressing gently against the next, creating constrictions that read simultaneously as organic growth and deliberate restraint. At 20 x 20 cm, it sits low and wide, closer in proportion to a sculptural object than a conventional table lamp – its presence determined more by mass than height. This is a meaningful distinction: the Lira is not designed to illuminate a room but to occupy it.

Hand-carving alabaster requires a practiced understanding of how the stone responds to chisel pressure across its grain – too aggressive and it fractures, too hesitant and the surface reads as machined. Sana Alam’s process, developed in dialogue with Indian artisans whose material knowledge predates contemporary design discourse, produces surfaces that retain the trace of making: subtle abrasions, gentle undulations in the lobed forms that confirm each piece’s handmade origin.