Candice Lawrence studied surface design at Cape Peninsula University of Technology, where her Bachelor's thesis explored the body language people use when sitting together at a table, the gestures made with hands and arms mid-conversation. It was an observation that would shape everything that followed.

The name Modern Gesture captures a question she kept returning to: how do you bring a contemporary sensibility to traditional materials and surfaces? She founded the studio in Cape Town in 2012 with that tension at its centre.

Candice works across lighting, homeware and small stationery, moving between plywood offcuts, ceramics, wax cord and various metals, always in conversation with the material, letting its physical and tactile properties guide the form. Her woven pendant lights draw directly from the layered geometry of traditional African jewellery, each shade built from interconnected circular hoops wrapped in hand-wound thread.

A 2015 finalist in the Nando's Hot Young Designer competition, the pendant lights earned her a commission for more than 400 installations in Nando's restaurants around the world. More recently, Modern Gesture's woven pendants were selected for the set design of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a recognition of both their beauty and their cultural weight.

Candice describes her process as a constant conversation between her hand and the material being shaped, one where the time and care invested in each piece becomes part of it. No two pieces are identical. That is the point.