Designer Profile: Adam Jackson Pollock

Adam Jackson Pollock is an award-winning lighting designer and founder of Fire Farm. His designs grace public areas of 5-star hotels around the world as well as private residential, visual merchandising, restaurant, health care and commercial spaces. Fire Farm was started in a garage in Oakland, California in 1991 to mash up his sculptural theatrical lighting experience into designs that emotionally warm the spaces they inhabit.

Play and exploration are key to Adam’s designs, they are the aesthetic theme that ties his body of work together. There is a constant exploration into unusual materials used for diffusion, capture and expression of light that continues as a hallmark of the Fire Farm design philosophy today. The quality of light emanating a fixture is as important as the form itself.

Adam’s design guidance and business leadership has rewarded Fire Farm with numerous design accolades over the years:

2016 Innovation and Excellence Award in Lighting for the Ringz collection
2016 Best Lighting Product Lighting: Individual Lamp/Lighting Devices at IIDA/HD Product Design Competition for the Belle
2016 Best Competition Eric Engstrom Award 20th Annual IIDA/HD Product Design Competition for the Belle Pendant
2013 Best of Year Finalist for Floor Lamps Interior Design Magazine for the Arc Lamp
2013 Best of the Year Finalist for Chandeliers Interior Design Magazine for the Ribbon Chandelier
2013 Editor’s Choice Award Best New Product Design All Categories at IHMRS/BDNY tradeshow for the Ribbon Chandelier
2001 American Furniture Award Home Magazine
1997 Better By Design Award Better Homes and Gardens Magazine

Adam’s father, an accomplished photographer and architect, and his mother a ceramicist and painter, named him after the abstract-expressionist painter Jackson Pollock and nurtured his curiosity about the relationship between light, art and human interaction. An early passion for photography instilled a keen sensibility for light and its capacity to reflect and reveal the physical world around us. At Pomona College his interests expanded to include more sculpture and theatrical stage lighting. His major was self-defined as The Role of Art In Society. A grant to explore the relationship between the built environment and social interaction seeded a life-long interest in architectural space as a motivator to culture and societal development has manifested itself as a strong commitment to the redevelopment of his adopted home town of Elkader, Iowa. His commitment has been recognized throughout the years, receiving:

2005 Renew Rural Iowa Leader Award
2006 Iowa Main Street Challenge Grant
2007 Best Development Award for his downtown building renovations
2015 Iowa State Volunteer of the Year Award
2017 Profiled on Iowa Public Television for his entrepreneurial activities

Adam is dedicated to manufacturing all Fire Farm products in the United States and investing in his local community. He has created a work environment where 50% of the staff can walk to work, where employee safety and well-being is paramount, and the commitment to environmentally respectful work processes are maintained. In his spare time he can be found down the street at the river surfing the waves in his short kayak or playing with his five children at their 1865 stone farmhouse on an acreage just outside of town.