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| Seaweed Lamp |
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| Materials: copper, seaweed, plastic bags |
My first hands-on engagement with seaweed was over 12 years ago, and you can find my early discoveries regarding shaping, molding, and stitching seaweed here: Seaweed. Working with seaweed is like wrestling an alligator, particularly when it comes to stitching the prickly, unwieldy, ever-shrinking stuff. This time around the shrinkage was almost my downfall. I thought I had collected more than enough to create a seaweed lampshade, with a large Tupperware container packed to the brim with wet bounty. Ah, but it shrinks!
In art as in life, every problem is an opportunity, and the "Oh crap, I don't have enough seaweed" problem provoked the invention of a lamp that reflects the Anthropocene aesthetic, reflecting the degree to which the human species is having an impact on the planet earth. Gauzy plastic bags (often mistaken by fish for jellyfish in the ocean and ingested with lethal results) intermingle beautifully with the vibrant colors of the seaweed. The top fixture of the lamp is copper, the mining of which is severely toxic to the environment.
From artistic challenges and a bummer of an inspirational premise, the seaweed lamp was born to reflect the shifting aesthetics of the Anthropocene, in which environmental destruction and copious amounts of garbage are simply the new landscape.
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| Iluminated seaweed |
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| Seaweed artfully intermingled with garbage |
The Process
The seaweed was collected from the shore at Monastery Beach, where the ocean fights back effectively enough against man to be able to kill a few every year.
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| Seaweed in situ |
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| The beach that fights back |
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| Playing with wet seaweed |
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| Drying and shaping seaweed |
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| The lamp at night |
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