Several months ago when Adam Davidson was visiting his friend Alan, he saw what he thought was an old broken pipe bowl. Intrigued by the object’s simple yet elegant shape, he asked about it. Davidson discovered that he was holding a 2,000 year-old fired-clay lamp that Alan – a Christian musician – had acquired on one of his many tours to the Holy Land. “Once I saw the lamp at his home and thought it was a broken pipe, I realized I had to make a blasted briar version,” Davidson recalls.

The lamp, which was excavated in Judea, Israel in November 1986, was dated to the first century A.D. – the time of Christ – and was certified as authentic by the Israeli Office of Antiquities.

This Herodian-type lamp was used by Jews living in Judea. The lack of ornamentation – unlike Roman lamps from the same period – signals that its makers were using molds developed after the Jewish Maccabbean revolt against the Hellenistic Syrians that is commemorated on Hanukkah.  The lamp owner’s strict observance of the commandments is revealed in its functional simplicity and lack of ornamentation.

Lamps like this one burned oils pressed from olives and nuts. Rarely, crude oils that oozed from the earth were used. Papyrus, linen, flax, or simple rush wicks were inserted into the nozzle where they conducted the oil upward to the flame. Olive oils were a preferred fuel because they burn so brightly; an olive oil flame is significantly brighter than a candle and there are biblical references to its use: “And you shall command the people of Israel that they bring to you pure beaten olive-oil for the light, that a lamp may be set to burn continually.” (Exodus 27)

Obviously, the shape of the pipe Adam Davidson created takes its shape cues from the lamp. One small difference is that Alan and Adam decided to add a lug (a nub-like protuberance opposite the wick-holding nozzle) which is on another lamp that Alan owns.

Adam Davidson’s briar-echoed shape is slightly taller than its lamp inspiration. The tobacco chamber depth is slightly less than an inch and the chamber diameter is .75 inches. The sandblasted pipe bowl is unstained with only carnauba wax applied. “Natural is natural and if it is smoked it will darken like a well used lamp,” Davidson explains.

Davidson only recently purchased a sandblasting cabinet and this pipe is the first Davidson-made pipe to be sandblasted. In what may be an unusual act for a pipe artisan, Adam decided that he wanted Alan to sandblast the pipe for a few minutes.

“My friend Alan came over a few weeks ago for the first time, and I was just practicing my first blast with my new setup an hour before. This is the first Adam Davidson stamped sandblast. I made sure Alan got to sit in the drivers seat and blast for a few minutes, which he really enjoyed – something that solidified his connection with the set, on top of being good friends with me, and buying the original on his journeys as a musician.”

To complete the pairing and to set off the colors of lamp and pipe, Adam built a stand of Missouri-mountain slate. The slate sits on lathe-turned Delrin pins with a thirty degree bevel. The bevel makes the light play on the pins’ surface, creating a shiny black contrast to the rusty-leafed variegations of the shale shear fractures.

An intriguing paradox surfaces in the coupling of lamp and pipe into this evocative pairing of antiquity and creation. Ancient sacred texts treat fire as a metaphor for destruction and light as a metaphor for spiritual meaning, yet the lamp’s light is impossible without fire.  In these sacred texts, lamps light the way to spiritual fulfillment through righteousness, wisdom, love, and devotion.

Sages remind us that the possibilities for good and evil always co-exist; one must look to purpose and, even then, the force of the paradox endures. The Book of Proverbs (20:27) reveals the joining of lamp, enlightenment, and self-examination simply but powerfully:
“A man’s soul is the lamp of God, which searches the chambers of one’s innards.”

It is from the lamp’s wick nozzle that Davidson’s simple, tapered-vulcanite stem rises. It is almost eery that the pipe’s smoke will be drawn from the lamp’s place of “enlightenment.”

Smoking a pipe has long been associated with cultivation of the contemplative self and devotion to the seeking of wisdom. In crafting this set, Adam Davidson has done more than mimic an ancient shape; unwittingly or not he has conjured a knot of metaphors and associations that are as paradoxically unresolved as is the continuing wrestle of good and evil, light and dark, enlightenment and craven ignorance.

This set is brilliant and beautiful not only through its cleverness and craft, but in its curatorial principle. We discover once again that objects resonate most with meaning that is created in context. This ancient, simple fired-clay lamp creates a philosophical context for Davidson’s pipe that is freighted with meaning. How much meaning will resonate? Certainly there is more meaning here than I bargained for when I began to write this post – there is at least enough paradox to last for another 2000 years.