Ted Bradley reflects on making the jump from his corporate career at Google to create lighting designs that were deemed impossible to make.

?There?s death in these sculptures, but also life,? says lighting designer Ted Bradley, from his eponymous studio in Boulder, Colorado. He?s talking about his Samsara, the piece that bedeviled him for six years in the conceptual stage and required a solid 12 months to fabricate. With a metal spine connecting a series of porcelain rings, it?s inspired by the bleached ribcage of a whale. When first approached with the project, master mold makers told Bradley that they thought creating the porcelain rings to his specs would be highly challenging, if not impossible. ?I had this very specific vision, but I didn’t yet know how I was gonna make them,? he says. ?I thought it’d be pretty straightforward. I’m an engineer, I’ve worked with ceramics for years ? I started in November and thought that by the end of the year, two months, I would have the thing completely built and ready to go.? It didn?t go quite as planned ? but a year later, Bradley figured it out, and the Samsara is now his showcase piece. ?????"""""""""""""""""
In this week?s Milkshake, Bradley digs into the nitty-gritty of those technical details, as well as explains why he left his super-stable corporate ? with Google, no less ? to pursue his lighting-centric dre...