A real oldie for this week’s flashback – and a strange one at that! I made this lamp on my Foundation course all the way back in 1993, and I can’t remember the brief exactly, but I recall it was about making something new in response to the work of an existing artist (so not much has changed!).
For my source of inspiration, I chose Hieronymus Bosch and his famous painting, The Garden Of Earthly Delights (which likely surprised exactly no one, given the painting’s lewd subject matter and filmic spectacle). I decided to model my lamp after the painting’s strange rock-formations – part-mineral, part-crustacean, part-cacti – and combined a host of different techniques: annealing metal, blacksmithery, fibre-glass and resin…
Okay, so it wasn’t a very attractive lamp, and I think it ended up in a skip, but I had a huge amount of fun producing it. I dug out the few surviving photographs of it and re-photographed them for the purpose of sharing them on here, so the quality isn’t great, but the thing stood at about sixty centimetres high and was a working lamp, with that rather grim-looking sphere lighting up to glow pinkly, like some b-movie brain or cosmic egg.
Red's Kingdom 
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