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Lin Tianmiao
Private Reading Lamp
2010
fabric, steel frame, light globe, seat
When monitoring systems surveil almost every corner of public environments, it seems both
difficult and funny to set up a private place for personal leisure, thinking, reading, reflecting or
even fantasising. And in a time when personal thoughts and information are so readily shared
and circulated through social media, Lin Tianmiao’s
Private Reading Lamp
seems strangely out of
place. The work evokes another analogue sense of time, when the library and the book, the author
and the reader, all revolved around a certain privacy of mind.
Private Reading Lamp
is also a
sculpture for simple pleasure, for entertainment or even just for rest.
Reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s soft oversized sculptures, Lin’s
Private Reading Lamp
is made
of cotton fabric over a stainless steel, spot-welded frame that also supports the internal lighting.
The lampshade-shaped sculpture is made of scores of metres of sewn fabric strips, kept in place
by the needlework of teams of women in both China and Australia who separately assembled the
two-metre-high sculptures. In Australia, the sculpture was suspended from the ceiling to offer
a seated position for western style comfort; while the installation in China was approached as a
‘floor lamp’ with generously comfortable internal cushions and was placed anywhere within the
libraries’ public areas.
A signature quality to Lin Tianmiao’s work is her use of textiles, twine, and other mixed media
assembled through hand-sewn processes to produce highly crafted artworks that can involve
large teams of assistants contributing long and painstaking hours of labour to complete. The
delicate and decisive use of thread has an implied gravity that is often rendered through the
female figure or referenced to the body.
Private Reading Lamp
implicates the body through the
invitation to enter and complete the artwork. The quiet performative spectacle that the work
creates through its invitation to occupy is another dimension to ponder. The sculpture gently
unfolds a sequence of vacant and occupied, absence and presence, as its private space is individu-
ally reinterpreted and personalised.
