Hanging Oil Lamp by FOS

FOS’s hanging oil lamp is a small luminary object made from the most ordinary thing – a glass bottle – held inside a slender brass armature that lifts it into something else entirely: a lantern, a relic, a working sculpture. The bottle becomes the oil reservoir. A cotton wick rises through a brass burner. Above it, a glass chimney sits beneath a folded brass roof, like a miniature shelter for the flame. The whole piece hangs from a single loop, light enough to carry, complete enough to stand alone.

In FOS’s hands, function is never neutral. His objects are scenes – quiet theatres for the rituals of everyday life. To light this lamp is to keep one of the oldest gestures alive: oil, wick, flame, shelter. It belongs to the same family of works as A lamp that feeds itself, the piece FOS placed beside Shakespeare’s first sonnet in his monograph Gestalt – a meditation on what consumes itself in order to give light.