Rebecca L. Judd for Also Cool: Hi there Camila, thank you for taking the time to speak with me! I’m so curious about you and your art, and I know our readers are too.
To get started, I would love to know more about your creative background. How did you first emerge as an artist, and as a lighting designer more specifically?
Camila Gaza Manly: I would say both go back pretty far in my life. I grew up on Vancouver Island in BC, so I had a very rural upbringing – surrounded by nature, going to the ocean and camping… I also went to Waldorf school, which was a big early influence on my development artistically. So when it comes to my artistic style and early background, [those things] are a strong foundation that I still draw from a lot now.
Both sides of my family are very artistic – my mom’s side is German, and she’s an artist. Both her parents were artists. My whole family [were] painters and sculptors, it’s probably in my blood or something (laughs). My dad's side is half Danish with lots of wood workers, and he's a musician. [His family] had farms and were always working with their hands and being artistic.
I came up with the name for my project during lockdown when I was thinking about my family a lot. ‘Lys’ is the general word for ‘light’ in Danish. It can also be used to mean ‘lamp’ and ‘candle’. ‘von’ means ‘from’ in German, and is part of my mother’s maiden name that I didn’t receive. And ‘Asta’ was my great grandmother's name on my Danish side. I never met her, but have always felt very connected to her. We share petite stature and certain characteristics. She raised twelve children on a farm and lived until the age of 96. She has always been a great source of strength for me. ‘Light from Asta’ is where my heritage and aspirations meet.
When it comes to [transitioning into] lamps, that also started around the same time [in life]. At Waldorf school, my teacher really didn’t like the overhead fluorescent lighting in our classroom. She would turn them off and bring in her own lamps – I think we had about 12 different lamps in the classroom instead of the overhead lighting. I got used to that softer light work environment – I think it might make a lot of people feel less motivated, but I work well in comforting lighting. [Our class] would also do lantern walks, which were outside in the autumn, and we would make our own lanterns. That would be my earliest lamp-making experience.
I was also lucky enough to work on large-scale lantern festivals with my mom's sister, which is something she did regularly during her illustrious career. My favourite [festival] was the Dark Sky Festival in Jasper. It was an astronomy-based festival, as [Jasper] does not have a lot of light pollution. They had Chris Hadfield talk, and kids could come and see the night sky from cool places. We did a nature walk and we had giant mushroom lamps and little dioramas with space scene backgrounds. It was so magical to create that little walk through the forest.
Also Cool: That's such a tender memory to hold close. [Lamp making] becomes a testament to your growth as a person. It [must be] a really nice constant to have in your life.
Camila Gaza Manly: I think that’s a good way to put it! It has felt a lot like a constant. My family always had nice lamps, my school always had nice lamps, [and then] transitioning to high school and university was quite different – partly just because of the lighting.
AC: Right, there are so many reasons why you’d want to create art that’s not only beautiful to look at, but very livable.
What does it mean to you to produce art through this specific medium? Why does lamp artistry feel like the right outlet for you?
CGM: It kind of feels like it’s my own canvas. I’ve always painted and drawn and worked in wood and sculpted a little bit, but creating something that’s more of a functional sculpture… somehow, it feels more true to who I am. If I just have a canvas or a piece of paper… it’s two-dimensional. I would say the three-dimensional aspect is very big for me right now.
I finished my degree last year, during the pandemic, in linguistics and philosophy. So [another] part of it too is just that I have been burnt out since finishing school, [but] returning to earlier influences and inspirations has been really inspiring. [These influences] keep feeding off of each other – when I was doing my [100 Days of Creative Prototyping] project, I had all these ideas to begin with, but the more that I would do them, the more they would come, tenfold, all the time. I think it was that daily practice, where even when I didn’t want to do it, I forced myself to do it.
AC: You briefly mentioned your background in linguistics and philosophy. To be in the arts community and not enter it by way of [formal university] training … I’m curious to know how you think that affects or enhances your art.
CGM: On the business side, it gives me a strong foundation to organize things. I was really involved in the linguistics community, so I got a lot of experience managing and organizing events.
I feel really happy that I did the degree I did, even though right now I’m pursuing something totally different. Before I studied linguistics, I was studying French – just to live in [Montreal] – and that’s how I found out about the linguistics program. [Even] before that, my plan was to go to school and study industrial design, because I wanted to make lamps.
But had I done that, I wouldn’t be making the lamps I’m making now. I'm sure I would be making cool stuff, but I feel glad that it happened the way it did – now I'm making things that are completely out of my own head and sometimes they're pretty funky and weird.
I’ve had friends who’ve gone to art school and sometimes I was envious of the ability to just go to a studio and take that time off of thinking and writing papers. I wanted to take some elective classes but it’s hard to do that. But seeing my friends go through formal art training, I feel like it’s really limiting in a lot of ways. You learn a lot, but I think some people lose their personal creative [touch].
AC: You need to think about it, too, through a lens of “transferable skills” and thinking about what it is you bring to the table. It's intimidating to consider the inaccessibility of certain resources, by virtue of not studying [your craft]. But it's also really exciting to think about “okay, how can I turn it around?”
CGM: I think it also created a necessity for me to return to making things with my hands. I love academics, but I’ve always needed that balance. It’s so refreshing to engross myself in a project where I don’t need to go “X, Y, Z…”
