Bike-Chain Chandeliers You've Got to See
Bicycles are great for exercise and cutting down on gas costs. But how about for stylishly lighting your bedroom? Sure, as Los Angeles artist Carolina Fontoura Alzaga has discovered. She turns salvaged bike parts into enormous chandeliers, sconces and lamps.
Her latest commission is for French watchmaker F.P. Journe’s Los Angeles boutique. The 8-foot piece (4 feet in diameter) contains numerous bike rims, cogs and about 400 chains. It took her several months to plan the design, working with a structural engineer and sourcing the material from junkyards.
Over a two-week period, her roommates — a mix of artists, film producers and editors called the Catalyst Art Collective — used a GoPro camera to record a time-lapse video of the assembly process.
Check out the video and learn more about Alzaga and her work below.
Alzaga’s latest chandelier is named Connect 27, seen here in her warehouse. She painstakingly degreased each chain by hand.
The commissioned piece now hangs in the F.P. Journe watch boutique in Los Angeles.
Many of Alzaga’s clients are homeowners who commission her. She’s made around 60 chandeliers, lamps and sconces, all from discarded bike pieces.
Alzaga, shown here, was born in Mexico City but grew up in Denver, where she earned a BFA in painting and digital art while living in a “punk house,” as she calls it, with 12 other people. “It was an intentional community situation that was all about cooperation and collaboration, sharing resources and making do with what we had,” she says.
Her roommates ran a community bike shop, so she was also surrounded by bikes and bike parts. One day she walked into her kitchen and noticed someone had turned a bike rim sideways and used it as a pot rack.
A couple of years later, when it came time to do her BFA thesis, she decided to build a chandelier out of bike parts. The project won Best in Show.
She then moved back to Mexico City, where a gallery owner approached her to build a chandelier for his gallery, Fifty24mx. The owner liked it so much, he invited her to do a solo exhibition. She wasn’t planning on continuing the series, but it took off from there.
Alzaga then moved to Los Angeles, where she now works full-time making chandeliers and other lighting pieces solely from bike parts. She has a five-month backlog of commissions.
Integral to the concept is that bike parts must be used. Alzaga scavengers junkyards for tossed bikes and strips them for chains, rims and cogs before assembling them using a combination of methods (sorry, trade secret).
“I like to think I’m redirecting the fate of the material,” she says. “Every individual chain tells a story about where it comes from. All the chains come from a 200-mile radius of Los Angeles. Imagine what sorts of stories are put together in this object.”
More salvage art: See a romantic cabin made with recycled windows
