Mask Lamp ‘Tongue’ by FOS

FOS’s Mask Lamps are a series of sculptural wall lamps cast in bronze, each named for a part of the body that a mask borrows from — hair, tongue, mandible. The works extend a thread that has run through FOS’s practice for over two decades: the mask as object, as character, as a way of carrying meaning across a surface. In his monograph Gestalt, many of these face-derived works are gathered together; the lamps belong to that family, brought down to the scale of a wall fixture.

Each piece is hand made in Denmark in cast bronze. Small enough to live above a bedside, beside a doorway, or in a quiet stretch of hallway. The light source sits inside the form rather than crowning it,  so the lamp reads first as a sculpture and second as a fixture: a body part rendered in metal, glowing low.

The series currently includes three works:

• Mask Lamp Hair
• Mask Lamp Tongue
• Mask Lamp Mandible