When we spoke on the phone at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Martine Bedin was thankful to have settled in her home in the mountainous region of northern Corsica, where she spends half of her time. The house provides her with all the artistic necessities that allow her to keep working, she explains, namely her professional archives, sketchbooks, and a fully-equipped studio. “As I get older, my work has started to change from simply observing the natural environment over time. I went back to what made me want to go to school in the first place – drawing based on nature.”

Which would come as a surprise to someone only familiar with Bedin’s early oeuvre, marked by her contribution to the radical Memphis movement in the early 1980s in Italy. With Memphis, she mostly designed experimental lamps and furniture, a journey that she started early on – even perhaps too early. She was only 23 years old when Sottsass took her under his wing upon seeing her Casa Decorata which from the Triennale Milano in 1979. Co-founding Memphis provided her with an ideal design education, a premature experience that led her to conceive an impressive variety of objects with some of the most free and irreverent thinkers in the industry.

It is in this highly creative context that her iconic Super Lamp came about (designed 1981), the group’s most profitable object, whose prototype is now held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Designed like a dog, the illuminated crescent-shaped body on four wheels can be trailed around using a long chord. “I wanted to be able to drag the lamp behind me, and that is why I designed the Super Lamp. I am very much a tinkerer, and there I felt like tinkering.”

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