BURLINGTON — Designers Rory Shamlian and Clay Mohrman had no idea what kind of reaction they would receive when they sat on a couch in their spacious terra-cotta-pottery-filled studio and uploaded a video revealing how they turned an iridescent glass bowl into a wall light.
It quickly went viral.
Now, their “Will it lamp?” series online — which documents the creation of 14 lamps and two thrift shop hauls — is a hit that gained Shamlian and Mohrman 50,000 followers on Instagram and 30,000 on TikTok in just two weeks.
The one-minute videos follow a playful formula: discover an object with a cool shape, envision its potential as a light, weigh options like a globe or trapezoid-shaped bulb, and reveal the finished product — all with visible excitement.
In their debut video, they admired a glass bowl, captivated by its shimmering surface. The video cut to them drilling into the translucent glass, in disbelief that they succeeded. They then attached a 6 inch globe light bulb, and the video wrapped up with the finished lamp glowing softly on a bedroom wall.
“We saw this piece and held it up in the window with a really direct source from the window from sunlight, and we were like, ‘It just looks so cool’,” Mohrman said, a 33-year-old sculptural lighting designer originally from Boston.
In the same South End studio, sitting at a table filled with their newly created lights, Shamlian and Mohrman recently recalled how that moment felt to them.
“We think it’s fun and we’re having a good time with it, but we weren’t sure if people were gonna feel the same,” said Shamlian, 32, a ceramics and lighting technician originally from Syracuse, New York.
The duo first crossed paths nearly a decade ago while bartending at Radio Bean, a Burlington bar, long before their foray into lighting. Initially working out of separate studios, they later decided to combine forces, moving into the space they now share.
They don’t want to disclose what they call their “secret sources” — where they find their lighting parts — but all of the decorative pieces they use, including plates, a bowling ball and all kinds of bowls, are thrifted.
They both have studied vintage lighting design, particularly Danish designer Polson and other designers who work for the Italian glass and lighting company AV Mazzega. That’s given them inspiration for shape and helps them see the potential for different pieces they find in thrift stores, they said.
Mohrman, wearing mocha-colored overalls, recounted their first thrifting excursion for the series. “We both love thrifting anyways, but we went in and I think we were there for two hours in the store because we’re like, ‘this could be a lamp’,” he said. “It was just looking at things in this whole different way that we were just cracking up. We were like, ‘This is the best thrifting day we ever had.’”
Each new light takes only about one hour to build, but the process behind the scenes requires significantly more time. When you factor in thrifting for materials, designing the light, editing the videos, and cleaning up, you can easily add a few hours to the overall effort.
While brainstorming potential designs, one object both designers would love to turn into a lamp is a mantelpiece bust, once they find one. Mid-conversation, Shamlian lit up with another fresh idea she’d been holding back.
“I had the idea the other day and I didn’t tell you this yet,” Shamlian said to Mohrman. “But if we were to find building blocks, drilling holes in all the building blocks and making like stacked ones for like pendants hanging on a cord—” Mohrman cut in immediately, clearly intrigued. “Oh my god, what type of building blocks?” he asked.
“Wooden ones,” she replied.“Either different colors or all one color, we could drill through and use, like, on the cord anyway.”
For a moment, the two seemed to forget their surroundings, lost in the idea.
Ode to the organic
Behind their designs lie combined years of craftsmanship. Shamlian loves working with clay but she uses it as a medium to design, reimagining its possibilities beyond traditional pottery. “I think I’m more of a designer than a potter’s potter,” she said.
The seeds of her aesthetic had been planted at a lighting shop close to the studio, where she worked wiring lamps and encountering lighting designs spanning decades — from sleek mid-century forms to wild, funky 1970s pieces, and ornate crystal chandeliers. “I saw so much design that I was just digesting in there, that it really helped me figure out what it is I like and what it is I don’t like, and how to incorporate that into my own work,” Shamlian said.
When she combined this love of lighting with her ceramic practice, her vision crystallized and she decided to start her own business — Rory Pots, a ceramic lighting and object design practice.
Shamlian’s designs are deeply rooted in form, prioritizing the way shapes interact with light over surface decoration. Her work leans into the organic nature of clay itself.
“I often don’t glaze anything at all, just leaving it totally raw to showcase the material and how that makes a space feel,” she said. She said she believes in the intangible magic of handmade objects crafted from natural elements. “There’s something a little extra that comes with a handmade piece,” she said.
Shamlian dreams of collaborating with designers whose work she admires, and at the top of her list is Kelly Wearstler, an American interior designer known for her bold and luxurious taste. “She’s got such a style,” Shamlian said, adding modestly, “and I think she would really like my work.”
Meanwhile, Mohrman, when he’s not cutting through ceramics with a diamond drill bit (see episode three of “Will it lamp?”), is working with wood. But he insists he’s not a woodworker in the traditional sense. “I wanted to explore art and design within the medium of wood,” he said, drawing inspiration from land and space artists like Olafur Eliasson and Andy Goldsworthy.
The designer, recognizable by his thick painter’s brush mustache, finds his materials in the most unexpected places. “A lot of it’s foraged, a lot of it’s given to me,” he explained.
Thanks to Instagram, strangers often reach out with offers like, “I just had a bunch of driftwood washed up, do you want it?” Trees fallen on friends’ properties or materials discovered during a casual walk through the woods often find their way into his studio. Though some supplies, like veneers, come from traditional distributors, Mohrman thrives on the unpredictable character of wood with a story. “Foraged wood has its own energy,” he said.
For Mohrman, lighting and wood aren’t just complementary — they are a way to merge concepts into tangible forms. “The more I learn about wood, the more I love it,” he said.
He is the founder and head designer of Clay Mohr Lighting, a sculptural lighting design firm that specializes in combining wood and LED technology. He recently completed two large-scale public pieces for a new park in Williston, his largest commission yet. “They were a response to land development there,” he said, adding that the sheer scale and engineering of the project made it a personal triumph.
Adding to an already busy schedule, Mohrman is now studying to get his master’s in architecture lighting design at the New York School of Interior Design. The classes are remote. Mohrman’s favorite designer right now is one who he has been studying: Richard Kelly, considered one of the pioneers of architectural lighting design.
When asked where they’d most love to see one of their lights installed, both designers were ready with answers. For Mohrman, Hotel Vermont immediately came to mind. For Shamlian, the Blind Tiger Burlington, a boutique hotel in a historic brick mansion, topped the list.
Sparking inspiration
While their studio is spacious, Shamlian and Morhrman are contemplating how to start thinning their lamp inventory. They’d like the lamps to go to the people who desperately want them and have been thinking of putting the lamps up for bid on eBay or a similar website, but they are still figuring out how to price them.
There’s at least one lamp you won’t be able to bid on. The pendant light made of hand-blown glass bowls, reminiscent of Carlo Nasan’s Lotus lamp, will not be sold. The ceiling light hangs above them as they work, a glass bubble inside of another bubble.
“That one is installed in the studio, actually, because it’s not going anywhere,” Shamlian said. It’s also the hardest piece they’ve made so far. It took them two hours to put it together and drilling out the glass was a big challenge, Shamlian said.
“We were dremeling glass for an hour. So that was the hardest one and most nerve wracking because there were also stress points with the glass,” Mohrman said, mentioning that using a lot of old materials is tricky if you don’t know anything about them.
They also see the potential of new ventures for the future. The duo has toyed with the idea of inviting people to collaborate by submitting photos of objects to transform into lights. They would select a few of these submissions, asking participants to send in the chosen items for the transformation. But transforming people’s own items carries risk.
“Our fear would be that we accidentally break someone’s heirloom plate or something while turning it into a light,” Shamlian joked. Still, the concept of working with personally meaningful items remains an intriguing possibility.
Their plan is to create more videos focused on educating people on how to craft lights and on wiring techniques. Their videos have sparked so much enthusiasm online that people have begun transforming their own thrifted and found objects into handmade lamps.
Kayley Goohue from Nashville, Tennessee, saw the duo’s first “Will it lamp?” video on her For You page on TikTok and immediately started following them as she is a huge fan of cozy lighting and thrifting, she said.
“It even inspired me to give it a try myself,” Goodhue said. She found a blue round vase and she used a bathroom sink bowl for the shade. “I attached a double bulb light socket to the vase so the bowl can sit perfectly balanced on that,” she said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘Will it lamp?’ 2 Burlington designers go viral turning thrifted objects into lights.