PHOTOS BY JOSEPH DE LEO

When we asked Lindsey Adelman to shoot one of her new pieces for our Self Portrait column earlier this winter, she took this photo of her newest Agnes chandelier for Roll & Hill, aiming to contrast its luxe slickness with the industrial backdrop she’d discovered just outside her studio window. But she didn’t stop there — having gone to the trouble of descending all the way into the bowels of her building’s shaftway, she figured why not make a day of it? With her studio assistants dangling from poles and teetering atop ladders, she managed to hang two more new fixtures in the dingy setting: a wood-encased update on her signature Branching Bubble chandelier, and a series of lamps for The Future Perfect made from c-clamps and blown glass blobs. Here, she tells us how she got the shots.

“The day we did the Agnes shoot for Sight Unseen, we also shot these two fixtures. The Clamp Lamps are brand new and are available exclusively at The Future Perfect on Great Jones, where we’ll do an installation of them during ICFF. Barrett sources old clamps on eBay and beyond and we get them plated in brass — I suppose each clamp has its own story. Michiko Sakano blows glass into each one of them and lets it slump with gravity. The Branching Bubble chandelier is a new version with walnut tubing over the armature, and it’s just now available at BDDW.

“For this half of the shoot, first we piled up people’s weird grungy furniture and dead plants to make these pillars, which we hung the new Branching Bubble above. Then we put five Clamp Lights over a disgusting picnic table, in the bowels of the building’s shaftway, underneath the fire escape. I styled it; I ran up the fire escape and got people’s cigarettes and ash trays and coffee cans. Then you see these really pretty plated clamps that are gleaming in the midst of this. I had to make amends with many of my neighbors because plants were falling over and spilling through the fire escape, and I was running around trying to apologize everywhere, returning the ash trays and trying to explain what we were doing. A photo studio worked in the dark for two hours for us because their lights were shining too harshly out the windows on our fixtures. And Barrett ripped her pants. That was a bummer.”