The Birth of the Barbie Lamp

I began working on mosaics several years ago and work almost exclusively with hand-painted Japanese china. Last year I went to the Altered Barbie show in SF and when I received their call for entries email a couple of weeks ago, I decided to broaden my mosaic medium and make a Barbie mosaic.

BarbieFight is a chronicle of the creation of my Barbie Lamp that I plan to submit for the show. It may also become a space for talking about other girlie projects I work on so the name Barbie Fight works on many levels (Thanks Paul -- I'm loving the name).

When I begin work on a mosaic it often starts with china I have bought from an unknowing soul who is elated to pass on a gorgeous tea set (sometimes even with dessert service) to someone they think will use it for tea and cakes. I silently snicker when I read their kind words, understanding their very valid misconception and imagining where I’ll make my first break in that saucer or where I’ll sever the spout from the teapot.

For me, these pieces, the china-mosaic is all about deconstruction-reconstruction. It’s about taking something beautiful and breaking it down into its component parts, parts not imagined by its previous owner. I think this is also why I like covering everyday objects: terracotta pots, picture frames, tiny table tops.

So know you know a little about what I do, here is the story of my Barbie Lamp:

I began this project with an idea: find Barbie tea sets and make a lamp mosaic. This was much harder than I imagined. For one, I could only find 2 patters of porcelain Barbie tea sets. The rest were plastic. And the two I found were honest quite uninspiring. I bought one and suspect I won’t use any of it for this project. It’s just too boring.



What to do with this? Clearly I need to find some porcelain Barbies and break them up. The tea sets are not going work.