The generalization is that almost anything of the appropriate size can be used as the base of a table lamp, especially if it’s vertically oriented. If you happen to have a sculpture of the right size, or a piece of ceramic art, you could just display it as an art object, sitting around somewhere for admiration. Or you could put it to a good use as a lamp base, in which case it will be displayed right in the middle of things. And all sorts of art work has been exploited this way.
Suppose, more specifically, that you have scored a high-end sculpture in bronze by George Sellers — one of his insect sculptures, in particular a magnificent staghorn beetle cast in solid bronze, on a walnut base, which Sellers has made into a lamp base:
As reported on the 1stDibs site, where the lamp sold for $14,000
From the site:
Dallas based sculptor George Sellers studied in Italy, where he was trained in the traditional methods by a master carver. He creates seductively Gothic home furnishings and objets using plaster and bronze as his primary mediums. … large staghorn beetle sculpture table lamp cast in solid bronze on a walnut base, designed in a fine arts foundry using the lost-wax method of casting
The whole thing is 3 ft tall.
Two pieces of background, about Sellers and about stag(horn) beetles
More on Sellers. From Architectural Digest, “Sculptor George Sellers Creates Nature-Inspired Furnishings: The Dallas artist crafts a handsome, otherworldly line of faux-bois furniture and lighting” by Rob Brinkley on 10/31/13:
From a Geppetto’s workshop of a studio in a gritty but hip area of Dallas, sculptor George Sellers is producing oddly beautiful trees. More specifically, arboreal segments — stumps and logs and branches, all chalk-white, with pronounced knots and gnarls. The craggy creations are part of Sellers’s Faux Bois collection of tables, seats, and lamps, available exclusively to the trade through David Sutherland Showroom locations in Dallas and New York. Except for the lamps, all the pieces can be used outdoors, thanks to their polymer-infused-plaster composition, which also gives the exquisitely detailed forms an ethereal hue.
“I wanted everything to be fantastical, but I didn’t want cartoonish,” says Sellers, adding that the designs were inspired by aged crape myrtles. “I wanted something closer to nature.” After a pause, the artist continues, “Well, pushed a little.”
The surreal quality of Sellers’s pieces springs from an offbeat mind and eye shaped by training in classical sculpture, especially a stint in Italy, where he honed marble into antique-style busts. Since 1997, operating out of his atelier in Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood, he has focused on decorative artwork — plastering walls, gilding ceilings, carving magnificent friezes and columns. Sellers also makes animals, caryatids, and mythical sea creatures (the latter for the 2009 Hulaween gala benefiting Bette Midler’s nonprofit New York Restoration Project), and he frequently collaborates with Douglas Little, a stylist and window designer known for his macabre sensibility; for Barneys New York two years ago, the pair concocted a wax bust/candle likeness of Lady Gaga that cried molten tears when set aflame.
Sellers has made furnishings in the past as well, but most were one-off commissions. His new pieces, however, are all cast by hand and made to order. As it happens, he is also launching his first collection of plaster animals, a menagerie that includes a rhinoceros, a raven, an owl, a cockerel, a hare, and two primates. Maxfield in Los Angeles will offer select specimens starting in November. Like everything the artisan crafts, they have an otherworldly feel, at least to him. As Sellers says, “There is some dark magic going on there.”
The beetles. From Wikipedia:
Stag [AZ: aka staghorn] beetles are a family of about 1,200 species of beetles in the family Lucanidae, currently classified in four subfamilies. Some species grow to over 12 cm (4.5 in), but most to about 5 cm (2 in).
The English name is derived from the large and distinctive mandibles found on the males of most species, which resemble the antlers of stags.
A well-known species in much of Europe is Lucanus cervus, … the largest terrestrial insect in Europe
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