Birds Ceiling Lamp

Designer's Note:

Experiencing the feeding birds, attracted by dishes with sugar,
is one of the features of lovely Caribbean living.
This sight was our inspiration for the central room lamp for
a client's beach house under construction.
We started big when we first sketched this piece.
The original lamp had a six feet diameter hundreds of leaves and many birds.
Some feeding or sitting, others in flight and others landing.
A piece to behold!.
We only made two:
the prototype used for making corrections and the client's final piece.
The construction of the client's house took much longer than expected
and we stored and exhibited the piece in our showroom for a few months.
Many loved the lamp, but found it too large for their space.
So we say this piece was born by popular demand.
We kept the original design concept but reduced the diameter to three feet.
The current model has five birds in the original positions and leaves
proportional to the new dimension.

Construction notes

The birds are three dimensional
and constructed from five or more fired and hand formed parts:
the head, the beak, the wings,
the body which is made of two halves and the feet.
After the parts are made,
they are soldered together and sanded to a smooth finish.
The leaves are hand cut from a steel sheet.
Their veins are and hand hammered.
The twigs that support the leaves are made from
thick metal wire to which the leaves are soldered.
The structural branches are of solid steel while those which support
the light fixtures are hollow to carry the electrical wiring.
After all the parts of the lamp are soldered together
and sanded to a smooth finish the fixture is given
three coats of rust inhibiting zinc chromate before final painting.