Thursday, February 4, 2010

Snake Skeleton Lamp

I made a snake lamp out of eucalyptus sticks I collected, epoxy putty, wax, a lamp coil from my childhood, nylons, and gesso. Then I put a layer of resin on- i'll know in a few hours how that turned out.

Here it is gessoed. Laptop for scale, folding travel hairdryer (wanted my gesso dry right away) for illusory scale. The spine is two long sticks that I bent, tied into place, then oven dried and removed the ties. Each rib pair is a stick that I knotted into a loop/pretzel, oven dried, unknotted, and snapped off the extra.

Here I have tied the lamp strand to the spine with strips of nylons. It's looped in the middle because I wasn't willing to make a snake as long as this strand of lights.
(flash messing up the color, not very opaque at all) Pantyhose legs stretched over the skeleton. This is spine side up, as snakes are, because I originally planned to have it match life.
But the different height ribs made it really hard to work with, they kept squashing down under the weight while I adjusted the pantyhose so I think this will be the way it's displayed. It's very grub-like. I am beyond pleased with it after all the sad sculptures I have been doing for this independent study class. In effect it is my midterm, and yes, I stayed up allll night working on it. (It's due monday but I have a lot of studying and writing for my other two classes.) Oh, I hope the resin doesn't ruin it. I kind of think it did. Resin is so tricky. But it was just too fragile with only the acrylic lacquer and fabric stiffener mix I painted on. It was too bendy for me to feel confident carrying it to the art department to use their ground to paint the resin, so I just carried it to the top floor outdoor landing of my apartment building, and I am very scared it will be carried off or damaged or confiscated for being messy and smelly. The advantage is that it is so foul smelling anyone who planned to confiscate it would need to go and fetch gloves.

No comments: