The Jelllamp

July 2025

Background

The Jellyfish-lamp (or JellLAMP) was a collaborative lighting sculpture made in collaboration with Pom. I hosted a workshop at Dinacon called “PLAMPS: Making lamps with found plant material.” I brought materials from home to make 10 small LED powered desk lamps, including custom made aluminum lamp bases, LED strips, power supplies, steel rods, and hardware. We foraged plant materials from around Segara Lestari to make lamp shades. After the workshop, I realized that these lamp objects were too large for people to realistically take home, and the plant material was going to dry out and make the lamps no longer PLAMPy. What to do with all these lamps that were no longer useful? I wanted to combine them to make a large sculpture that could live on in Les. I typically work with found materials and trash, as these constraints allow more creativity, and divert some resources from ending up in a landfill or in the atmosphere. I figured it should be something related to Bali, Les, or Sea Communities for it to be stewarded after we left. I talked to my friend Pom about this idea and she was immediately like “Lets make a Jellyfish!” She had been developing a technique to make a jellyfish type sculpture out of plastic bottles, but didn't know where to take it next. A collaboration was born!

The Process

Pom had already been working on a method for taking plastic bottles and turning them into a sort of "loom" to weave plastic bags through.

We used a large concrete planter and placed it upside down as our mold for creating this loom. Once we had the workspace setup, we could start cutting the plastic bags into strips to weave around our bottle loom.

This simple and effective method worked very well, and we learned and iterated on ways to cut, fold, and attach the plastics together. We ended up using large water bottles for the loom, adding strips to the original bottle to make it longer as we progressed. We also created the armature for the lighting at the same time. Trying to stick to only local materials, we cut strips of dried bamboo and soaked them overnight to create a hoop to hang the lamps on. After a few tries, we made a nice loop, stuck some cross pieces in it, and hung it from some second-hand fishing rope.
I sadly removed all the plant material from the PLAMPS and we attached 5 of the lamps to this armature via fishing line. All that was left was to wire up the lamps! All the lamps were attached to one central simple LED controller. The JellLamp was a success! It was a mad dash to finish it before the Friday, July 11th performance and party night, but we did it just in the nick of time, and it was flying high above the gamelan and traditional dance performance, and even became a kinetic sculpture, bopping up and down to the music during the afterparty dance on its makeshift pulley system, hung from a tree.

Acknowledgements

Thank you so much to Pom for being an amazing and hilarious collaborator!

Paula, Budi, Luh, Wilan, Wira, and many of the Sea Communities and Dinacon crew for helping us out when we needed extra hands.

Lee, Sid, Paula, and Andy for hosting this life-changing event of Dinacon!
Header Image Courtesy of Vincent Naples