Paper Lamp

My first full-sized paper lamp! It's taken me a while to work on this one, hours of sitting down with wire and pliers watching Brittany's copy of Carnivale. I started with a frame and no idea what i would do with it. The frame was originally supposed to be a cylinder, a core for rice-paper wrapping. This was the lamp that was supposed to go into Fringe with the ribbon lights. Then I started playing with the wire. I think I'm so attracted to it because it's shiny. Over time I ended up with a cardboard box full of sculptures of leaves and flowers and pods and vines and other strange things. It was funny to find myself making leaves, it reminded me of the wire exercise we did on Camp in 1st year. Eventually I started to work them onto the frame. That's how it stayed for quite a while, I wasn't sure at all that I wanted to add paper to it. After looking at it for a few days, i thought that paper might add definition to the sculptures and make them easier to see. I tore up bits of rice paper, wet them and molded them onto the leaves. I had no idea if they would stay in shape and stuck on once they were dry! After admiring the transparency and the way the light was affected by the layers of paper, i decided to start playing with colour.

While I was still in the process of making the sculptures, i could see them in my head layered with lurid reds, pinks and oranges, like the hothouse flowers you might find in an Agatha Christie plot. I resisted the temptation for some time, convincing myself to go for a colour scheme based around the natural rice paper. Perhaps a little pale blue would go well with the off-white? I hunted out my acrylic paints, and mixed some blue up with water and pva glue. It was a lovely pale colour, and when i dipped the paper in it i picked up globs of darker blue where the paint had stuck in lumps. This kept me happy for a while, and then I decided to make the colour darker. The rest is a blur. Blue, green, black, purple, light purple...it all started to be very pretty. Too pretty? So i added the lurid red flowers. After all, it already looked like a fairies' tea-party, and i still had to incorporate the budlights. And i really wanted some luridity.

Next was the lighting issue. Twining the lights around the stems and in through the flowers, as I had originally planned, was out of the question. Too too cute. After walking around it for a couple more days, i decided to try a clump of light dangling down, like a root ball or a nest of spiders. It turned out that i needed another wire structure to help it all sit properly, which was a great excuse to play with more wire. I'm really happy with the result. When the lamp is outside in the breeze, the loosely fixed sculptures shift slowly around the stem, and small extensions like the springs and leaves wave back and forth. When it's inside and the lights are turned on, the ball spins slowly and the light is diffused through the coloured paper. The photos don't really show it all, perhaps they're more of a taster. I'm glad I finished the lamp, now we just have to work out where it looks best in the house!