There is little that is cosy about HomeBase IV, a site-specific installation built around a dozen artists’ notions of home. It is installed in a vacant medical clinic on the Lower East Side, New York, unused for three years but still carrying the unmistakable whiff of an institution you don’t want to be in. “When we arrived, it had nothing in it”, says Leor Grady, the curatorial and programming director of the project. The building now has a dozen exam rooms filled with photos, videos, sculptural pieces and works of conceptual and performance art, many of which use materials found in the space. The idea was to allow a diverse array of artists to create and collaborate in and around a single space, and to engage the residents of a changing neighbourhood. As we devoted ourselves to light every day, it was to be expected that one artist in particular attracted our attention… It is about Letha Wilson, a mixed media artist who used hacked-out drywall to create a replica of the Danish designer Poul Henningsen’s Artichoke Lamp, still today produced by Louis Poulsen, one of the companies of Targetti Poulsen Group.
Letha is very interested in the intersections between the natural world and architecture, specifically points in which these two areas are merged. Many of her previous artworks incorporates photography of the landscape with sculptural materials, or video work in which interior architecture is explored alongside images from the vast wilderness of the American West. “I see furniture as an intersection between architecture and the human form”, she explains “and I am interested particularly in modernist furniture both as objects of design, and of desire. I was drawn to Poul Henningsen’s Artichoke Lamp both as a beautiful object, but also because it directly draws from nature in its construction, the layering of its ‘leaves’ and the quality of light created by these reflections. For me the notion of light is related so much to the outdoors and natural environment, and how artificial light can re-create this. I also was interested in the fact that Henningsen created the lamp in an attempt to replicate candlelight by diffusing the light through refraction. His designs’ merging of beauty and mathematical concerns really struck me”. Letha created her ‘very personal’ Artichoke by studying many photographs of the Artichoke Lamp she found online, and seeing one in person as well. Based on this she created the ‘core’ of the Artichoke Lamp using recycled wood, building individual shelves to hold each ‘leave’. The centre top is removable so that changing the lightbulb is simple. Then she made a paper pattern for each layer of the lamp, 12 different shapes and 72 leaves in all. She traced the patterns on the wall in the room, and used a jigsaw to cut each piece out of the wall. Then each piece was screwed in with one screw into the wooden frame once it was hung in the space.
The idea for the piece came from Letha as she has been working with recycled gallery walls, in both outdoors and indoors work, putting these ‘walls’ in situations where they were confronted with natural elements and ultimately worn down. “As I have a background in building walls for galleries, I am quite familiar with drywall as a material, and also find it ironic that although this material is important to us as the fabric of our walls, its also considered quite cheap and useless in other applications. I wanted to take that wall material and push it in the other direction, and replicate a high-design object. This led me to the Artichoke Lamp, and for this specific installation I was taken by the idea of using the walls themselves as the material for making the lamp. The piece is titled You Only Have What is Here and Now, and it was about taking only the materials available in this empty room but creating this ideal lamp out of them; the walls are destroyed but the result is a beautiful chandelier”. Also the lamp then contains the remnants of the room including the peach-coloured paint, pencil markings and holes, so in a sense becomes a way of saving those pieces of wall. “One of the key concerns of the overall exhibition was the notion of ‘home’ – Letha says – and to me this piece is about taking any situation and making it feel like home, particularly in these times when homes and objects may easily come and go. That if left with no other resources but tools and your hands you could create something from scratch in the image of an beloved icon of modern design, and from the fabric of the walls themselves”.
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