Love for Lamps... to Take Over the World
Lovelamp is one of the artists of Dublin street art scene. In the past few years he has been attracting the attention of the public with his posters and stickers of lamps scattered all over the city. We asked him few questions about his unusual work and his opinion about Dublin street art.
What is the meaning of your work? It started off as curiosity as I have being doing letter based graffiti since 1997 but I didn't want to just put my name out there, I wanted to work with a graphic based image as opposed to letters. Ultimately I wanted to try and change the visual language on the streets of Dublin without attaching a name to it. Before I started there was only a small handful of stencil artists putting their work in the streets until the Danish artist Lints graced our streets with his presence. A chance meeting with this mystical Viking led me to a better understanding of this purely visual world where anything goes, as opposed to the stagnant "rules" & trends of graffiti. How many lamp stickers, posters and 3D lamps have you put up so far?
I cannot give an exact number of what I have put up so far, but it would be somewhere in the region of maybe 6000+ stickers, posters & cardboard installations.
They have gone from Dublin, Copenhagen, Berlin, Brighton, Prague, Paris, Rome, back to Copenhagen, over to New York, Philadelphia, LA and a number of other cities in between. And then there's Leitrim; but I would rather not talk about that...
Do you have any partner in your work?
I don't really have a partner in what I do, more along the lines of people I go to work with and collaborate with; mostly with some the artists within The Nom Nom Collective. The end process of getting the work out there is up to me. There have also been a large number of donated lamps that have been sent to me from other artists and fans.
What is your opinion about the current street art scene in Dublin?
It is very small and everyone knows everyone more or less. And with the current economic climate in the country, most people are driven to comment on it through their art. Although it's developing I feel that its still very much within its infancy. It's a shame with such easy access via the internet to be inundated with other countries styles, it may take a little longer to develop a unique Irish visual language; but there are those out out there that are striving towards that.
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