Bottle lights
Making lights from recycled plastic bottles...
David Bachelor made a fantastic chandelier for the Bloomberg Space - featured earlier on in this blog. I wanted to make one for myself to see the glow. Bachelor used 500 empty plastic containers of various sizes and colours - none of the literature says what kind of light he used, but I think each bottle had a pendant light with regular bulb and a very long flex that wound around a column and was plugged into a huge bank of power points on the floor. The whole thing was two stories high, maybe three including the space beneath.
This is a drawing from my sketchbook that shows how it was installed...
So I wished to make something for myself - I have been saving bottles for months now and it has become clear to me that only a very few are perfect for creating light fittings. Most are too dense and therefore opaque, or, more likely, too thin and therefore allow too much light and do not give the 'glow'.
Then there's the kind of light to use - I have tried fibre optics (too feeble), fairy lights (also too feeble except in one case where they worked well), ordinary bulbs (too hot), and finally settled on a low wattage candle bulb as shown in a previous post with the unsuccessful green bottle.
Finally I emptied a huge bottle of bleach and set about making another light - hurrah, success - the right amount of 'glow' and no problems with over heating etc. Here it is... [Oh no it isn't... Blogger won't let me post just now! I'll try again at another time, perhaps Blogger is suffering from heat exhaustion!]
Now obviously the effect that Bachelor achieved is much greater, more impressive than my one light, but it is, I think, in direct proportion to the number of bottles used. I am not always an advocate of size - in fact sometimes I think that making large works is a cop out because anything can look impressive with scale, but in this case the size is absolutely vital. I am happy to have made one light and do not need to create a larger piece, after all it is David Bachelor's idea not mine (and it would be hugely expensive), but I found it satisfying.
Next I turned back to the set of fairy lights that I had found for 50p in the Charity shop in Cushendall... Very small probiotic yogurt pots with the plastic labelling still applied did the trick - again lots of trial and error before finding this particular type. And this time very cheap!!!
posted by Lynda Cornwell @ 12:00 pm
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