ICFF 2010: The Most Nightmarish Lamp Ever Created BY Suzanne LaBarre
Fri May 14, 2010
British designer Alexandra Randall is bringing vermin out of the gutter and into your home. Plus other work debuting at Future Perfect.
Most of us know them as New York City's most hated residents. Alexandra Randall calls them a light fixture.
The Rat Lamp, as the name suggests, is a cluster of rats (stuffed, thankfully) clawing fiendishly to a bulb as if it were the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It's probably the sickest and oddly, one of the prettiest, objects to debut at New York Design Week. On view May 15 to 18, it'll show alongside work from Paul Loebach and Lindsey Adelman at the Future Perfect Great Jones in Manhattan. That show is part of an upstart attempt to create an entirely new design district in Manhattan: The Noho Design District, organized by Monica Khemsurov and our own Jill Singer.
Randall is a designer based in the U.K. She studied sculpture and creative writing, before turning her hand to the (ostensibly more lucrative) field of one-off lighting. She has rammed lightbulbs into the mouths of ducks, pigeons, squirrels -- pretty much anything dead with fur or feathers. But this isn't the twee crap of Victorian taxidermy (or of every "authentic" burger joint in the West Village). The fixtures deal in "the memory of everyday objects." Some, like the Rat Lamp and the Squirrel Wall Lights (below), are actually pretty poetic.
