A crystal ball, a Goblin King, and Bocci’s strangest – best collaboration yet. By September, Bocci’s Soho space had become something closer to a film set than a showroom. For nine days, from 12 to 20 September, 15 Bateman Street hosted Labyrinth Dreams, a collaboration between Bocci and British designer Bethan Laura Wood, sparked by an uncanny resemblance: the new purple 14p had immediately brought David Bowie to mind.
Bocci Meets the Goblin King
Not the man himself, but a very specific moment of him. Anyone who has watched Labyrinth remembers the scene, Bowie’s Goblin King rolling a crystal orb across his knuckles, the glass catching light as it moves. Wood saw Bocci’s new 14p in Purple for the first time and went straight there. She started calling it the Bowie Ball, half joke, half genuine recognition, and the name stuck long enough to become the seed of an entire installation.
What grew from that nickname is a sculptural landscape. Totems of varying heights rose through the space, each dressed in softly finished structures holding clusters of the 14p. Visitors didn’t view the installation so much as walk through it, the way you might move through an actual maze, discovering new arrangements of light and colour at every turn. Given the source material, that felt like the only honest way to show it.
A Labyrinth of Light
The purple itself did most of the work. Bocci hand casts the 14p in neodymium glass, a material with a genuinely strange property, its colour shifts depending on what light falls on it and what surrounds it. Under one bulb, it read lilac, under another, it drifted toward smoky blue or a warmer pink, so the installation never quite settled into one fixed palette. Walking through Labyrinth Dreams at 10 am and again at 5 pm, admirers found two different colour stories playing out in the same room.
That instability was precisely the point. Wood has spent her career using colour and pattern to provoke memory, and Labyrinth Dreams pushed that instinct further than most of her past work. A lamp recalls a ball, the ball recalls a film, and the film opens into a childhood memory of watching Bowie manipulate glass with impossible ease. Somewhere in that chain, an installation takes shape. Few lighting launches manage to carry that much narrative weight without collapsing under it.
By the time Labyrinth Dreams closed on the 20th, London Design Festival had no shortage of installations chasing spectacle. What set this one apart was restraint dressed up as fantasy, a handful of totems, one colour of glass, and a single well-chosen cultural reference doing more than most rooms full of screens and sound systems manage. Bocci’s Purple 14p now carries that story with it wherever it sells next, a lamp that started as a passing resemblance and ended up as a small piece of cinema, caught permanently inside the glass.
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