Torn from the wall light by Billy May

"New York Designer Billy May has an affordable yet innovative lighting scheme to sell you. Brought to our attention via our friends at Freshome, and intriguingly dubbed "Torn Lighting," the product presents a conceptual re-definition of sorts, since the fixtures "muddle the barrier between the room and its contents," with the resulting illusion that the light "comes from the room itself." The idea is deceptively simple: introduce elements that contain LEDs yet camouflage with wallboard (they can be painted or textured to match), thus creating the effect of a "torn" portion of wall that emits light from an unseen source.

May's collection includes fixtures with three different profiles: "Hangnail" adheres to outside corners, creating the illusion that the wall is peeling back on itself and resembling a sort of primitive sconce; "Dog Ear" attaches to straight runs and looks like it sounds—a turned-back page of paper; and "Crevice" fits to inside corners, establishing an unsettling rippling effect, the portion of wall in question thus seeming to harbor some pulsating life-form of innate phosphorescence.

Torn Lighting is purposefully random: no matter where you install the fixture, it creates the appearance of a haphazard illumination, but that’s precisely the point, as May says, "muddling" the traditional notion that light must come from a visible fixture or lamp. The concept establishes a sort of systemic mood lighting, in which the randomness of illumined objects or spaces interacts with the suggestiveness of the "hidden" source. "