LAMP
[1-3]: LAMP
[4]: A different but similar Malian iron lamp. We’ll explore this object in a future post…
From: Bambara culture, Mali 🇲🇱Source [1-3]: “African Furniture & Household Objects” by Roy Sieber
Source [4]: Africa and More on eBay
Source notes [1-3]: “Iron. H. 34 in. (86.4 cm). Large lamps are used in both secular and religious contexts and often depict, as here, a stylized human figure. Karite nut oil is burned in the cups and a twist of cotton serves as a wick; the cup symbolizes the mouth and the wick the tongue. Funeral chants portray death as the extinguishing of a lamp. See McNaughton, Iron-Art of the Blacksmith in the Western Sudan, 1975.”
Source notes [4]: “An antique forged iron oil lamp with tampers from the Bamana (Bambara) tribe, Mali”Relevant notes [From Dr. Daniel Mato on similar Malian iron lamps] : “Multi-armed lamp with cups to hold oil at the end of the arms. Oil known as tulu, made from the Karite tree nut was burned in the cup to produce a dark, smoky light that was as much a light for ritual purposes as for illumination. Lamps such as this would serve in the house but also would provide light, real and ritual, for masks when they danced at night.”
(www.hamillgallery.com)
Relevant notes [From Dr. Ron Eglash on fractal geomoetry] : “Focusing on Africa, he sought to answer what property of fractals made them so widespread in the culture. “If they used circular houses, they would use circles within circles,” he said. “If they used rectangles you would see rectangles within rectangles. I would see these huge plazas. Those would narrow down to broad avenues, those would narrow down to smaller streets, and those would keep branching down to tiny footpaths. From a European point of view, that may look like chaos, but from a mathematical view it’s the chaos of chaos theory-it’s fractal geometry.”
(https://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/special/eglash.african.fractals.html)Observations: FRACTALS, references to the human in form (figurative abstraction: head, arms, body, legs), language (cup is mouth, wick is tongue) and context (use in funerals), contrast in form (thick and thin)