Object Image

Porca Miseria

This chandelier is made of broken porcelain and cutlery and was commissioned for the Blue Dining Room in 2003. Its energy and irreverence make it particularly popular with visitors. Its appearance is the result of both accident and design. Maurer and his manufacturing team dropped the ceramics on the floor or smashed them with a hammer, further broke or smoothed some pieces, and then arranged and mounted them, with cutlery, onto the metal armature and light source.

Maurer's "Porca Miseria" hanging lights - of which only around 10 are produced each year - originated in a 1990 commission to design light sculptures for the Villa Wacker, on Lake Constance, in Germany, a late 19th-century house wit...

2003
Porcelain, steel, and halogen light
124.2003
Images and text © Waddesdon Manor, 2017

Where you'll find this

Waddesdon Manor
Permanent collection