Lighted Sculpture: Shadow

For my second Light Sculpture project I got super excited about the potential of lichen for weaving and soft filtered light.

Yeah, that is a $3 ikea desk lamp decorated with lichen macrame. I was excited about the column of illuminate lichen I imagined and wanted to conceal the black lamp with lichen so it just kind of happened. Then, from exactly the same components plus also a stick, I made a shadow sculpture that I am at least not ashamed of.
See I unscrewed the top part of the metal stick and wedged in a wooden stick that i bent with a giant plastic twist tie.

Here is a straight side view.

Lighted Sculpture: Turtle Lamp

So I want the lamps to be gossamer, fleshy, plant like, have skeletons, integrate wax or latex dripping and moss and bark and- well. The thing to do is sketch, and start. See where it goes. So I started with aluminum cans, made a model of an archelon skeleton. Just the shell. Archelon has a different skeleton than modern turtles. The carapace looks a bit like our ribs, and the plastron for some reason has starburst plates.



I spent a few hours cutting up 4 aluminum cans and sewing them together and bending them.

Then I covered each side with a split kleenex, ie one kleenex covered the whole lamp. It's soaked in fabric stiffening medium. Then when it was dry I lit it up. I like it! But it looked really bad when turned off. I want it to look all right both ways, but not look the same. Sort of soft and bulbous, then skeletal and vivid. But the crumpled tissue looks a lot crumplier and sloppier than I'd hoped. Applying the kleenex from the inside and using a hairdryer to bulge it out would have done the shape i was thinking of but would be terribly hard.

I gave it a coat of yellow mixed with orange/green interference shine stuff, mixed with uv protectant laquer for transparency. Then I brushed a second layer on the parts with aluminum to hide the shine and silver of it.

I plan to coat it with alazarin crimson (my most transparent red) but I like it so much as a yellow thing. I've no idea how to finish it. I actually think i should put it as a hanging lamp on a small bulb, and use air dry clay to blend the narrow end of the shell with the lightbulb casing and leave the open end as it is with maybe a few coats of laquer on the rim to smooth it out. actually i have a lamp part that can do that if i swap it with a very low wattage bulb.

Edit: I put it on the hanging thing and it works well. The hanging one is a crazy long cord from ikea meant to thread all around the wall and ceiling and support a pendant lamp. I think the turtle is too small for it but I am now planning to add blue leaves (either made from aluminum in the shape of turtle fins or more tentacular) to finish the base. That will bulk it up. If I can manage it it should also balance the way the lamp is narrow and flat.

My first lighted sculpture is not terrific but it will improve.

Lighted Sculpture Progress 1

Well I went to Ikea for basic lamps to illuminate my lighted sculptures. I found one I was interested in called Sunnan, which is 19.99, solar powered, and when you buy one one is given to a child who hasn't got electricity. I was interested in it because it is self contained, cordless, and since I am doing sort of plant-like organic lamps I like that it interacts with the sun. However, 19.99 is only kind of in my budget. If I bought it I wouldn't be able to buy other lamps, which I do need (though trying to figure out how I could buy the Sunnan I tried to figure out whether I could use only christmas lights my family already has for the other lamps, whether I could decorate my bed lamp, etc.), or if I bought other lamps I can't order liquid latex. So I bypassed it. I told myself I didn't want it anyway because warm light is very important for the aesthetic I want.

I ended up buying 2 lamp bases from the as-is section and one from the regular section. I spent 10.96 and I was really happy with that. I found lightbulbs for the 2 that were sold without, and started playing with making shades.

God Dream

I have only had a few really, really uplifting dreams in my life, and they make me feel uplifted for weeks when I think of them. I intermittently keep a dream journal but I don't have time in the morning considering how ordinary my dreams are usually.

Anyway. I was playing on a playground with other children, and a hole opened up in the ground. it was full of water and many of us fell in. The older children and teachers gathered instead of running, and helped us out from smallest to biggest. I was second. There were a few kids left in the hole who couldn't be fished out when it started deepening and shrinking away from us. I didn't want them to be alone so I dove in again. I think I died, because then I was in God's Library. It looked like a perfect diorama of some region, but instead of a horizon there were books all around. I didn't know how I got there and I felt I wasn't allowed. I was the height of a medium to small sized book. There were lots of rooms but I couldn't get into them. Then by running into a glass door I got it to open enough to slip through. This room was more protected, and a rhino headed angel guard went after me to keep me away. I hid amongst the books and took peeks at them, trying to remember everything I could because when would i ever get another chance? The rhino angel shot at me with arrows, but I dove into the large, clean diorama to evade him. I wanted to get out of the library and fly in the sky, but I couldn't find any way out of the library. Then I did and it was lovely.

Moss Scapes

Watching Rivers and Tides, the documentary about Andy Goldsworthy, made me really want to get my hands dirty in nature. So I did.

This one is supposed to evoke castles. Moss is a great medium I think, the trick will be keeping it alive.

These are dorodangos that i left really rough, going to get smoothed every time i spray the moss to water it.

By open studios i will have a table full of these i think. they take a bit more than 2 hours to build, after the moss is collected. They are to showcase my lamps which will poke out from between the moss scapes.

Love Robot 2

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I made Andrew another Love Bot, this one from Magic sculpt. I am really proud of how finished it is. The paint is a little uneven but the resin is really smooth and perfect.

I built it around a tiny, tiny bottle so it can hold pills, and so it wouldn't be empty I rolled up a love note and stuck it in.

Reading Courtesans and Fishsticks

subtitled "the consuming passions of classical athens", a book about fish, and prostitution (pornai), and hetaera (courtesans), and women's limited options in ancient athens. (I am only a third of the way through the book so far). And anyway the book makes being female in ancient athens seem so dreary. I am sure not every woman's life was, such as maybe a strong lady raised on a farm who then married a farmer. A woman could probably be happy at her family and community's discretion without that being the norm.

I am reading this book because my boyfriend used it as his main source for an essay he wrote as a final paper, a paper that made me really angry because when we were talking about it he insisted that women were for children or sex (depending if they were wives or prostitutes) in ancient greece, and men were for love, and boys were for (I sort of forget, a complicated sexual/mentoring relationship)... And since he was saying that they just didn't have the role of hetero lovers, I said some young people must certainly have fallen in love and married and had lives together and he said I didn't get it and wives were exclusively for children and running a household so I started to cry because I felt like by extension he felt if he knew me under different circumstances he wouldn't love me, wouldn't have the capacity to love me. He apologized and said he was sorry to be so insistent but he had been the one to research and write and rewrite the paper I was contradicting without looking at the sources. His paper is not an argument, so a lot of the material is just what is in this book with additional sources, because apparently that is the requirement for history papers.

I read that brothels and prostitution was legal, with a whore tax, but adultery was punishable by death, such as if a man were caught with "a member of the family", that is, another man's daughter or sister or mother or of course wife, he could be killed. I forget exactly what the rule was for having sex with slaves who weren't yours, but it was something like a fine. For slaves who were yours it was considered legal but disrespectful because they lived in the same household as your wife.

So anyway. A third of the way through this book and I am again taking it personally, wondering what if I had lived under those circumstances? There isn't a chance I would have to be a prostitute in modern times because women can do all kinds of jobs, besides which I am very lucky to be supported while I go to school, and lucky to be smart enough to go, and if I weren't my family and friends would still shelter me I am sure. And if I needed social services for a time that is available. But what on earth would I be able to do in classical athens? I wouldn't have any access to education, or be able to date. Would I be able to be a hetaera? (The book makes that sound like the most power women could have as they controlled their finances in that situation, running a household alone, free to go outdoors, as well as having powerful friends.) I don't really think so. I am shy and much better at projects and thinking than party conversation and, I assume, haggling over seduction.* I think I couldn't have been a prostitute in a brothel, as I would die of angst, but then all the women who had to work in them probably felt that way and most managed anyway.

I have concluded that while never having access to education would make me a different person, I would still enjoy and excel at producing things by hand. I don't think women could be artisans, but could do textile work, so maybe that is where I would have found my place.