Object-ives #42: Why I Want to Make Lamps of My Prosthetic Limbs

I’ve been traveling with a box of my body parts for two decades, and now I want to make art from them

Jul 10, 2026

The author’s daughter with the author’s running leg, soon to be a lamp

I had the idea on the treadmill. I was visiting my parents during the Christmas holiday and found myself jogging in the “theatre tread” room to a huge screen presentation of the movie A Christmas Story at the local gym. It had been a minute since I’d seen the movie, but when I saw the leg lamp make its famous appearance, I stopped the treadmill, adjusted my own artificial limb, and texted my friend: “we’ve got to make lamps out of my legs.”

We decided we’d make super high-end bespoke and bedazzled leg lamps. We’d get a welder. We’d attach old rusty yard art to the top, maybe animal antlers. We’d use the top of the outgrown running leg (one of which I was wearing while I had this idea), to hang a chandelier that we’d find at a thrift store. We’d wire them up and sell them on Etsy. We agreed this was our million-dollar idea: Leg Up Lamps.

I’ve been wearing a series of prosthetic limbs since I was four years old. The earliest legs were made of literal wood and metal hinges that needed to be oiled in the winter to reduce stickiness; the one I wore at six years old has a ketchup stain that wouldn’t come out, remnants of my grand idea to cover the leg in Heinz 57 “blood” and toss it through the basement window in order to terrify trick-or-treaters, which was hugely successful.

In the 90s I upgraded to my first hydraulic prosthesis, but like any equipment, artificial or otherwise, parts wear out. Each artificial leg in this country of criminal health care was ridiculously expensive, even after insurance “graciously” (as one insurance representative described it) paid for 20 percent of the $10-90,000 price tag. The question remained: What to do with these pesky legs? Do you throw out something that cost more than your car? I’ve therefore been hauling around a box of my own body parts for almost two decades.

If objects carry stories, which they absolutely do, then these legs are a doozy. I traveled all over the world in one, carried two children in another, lost a child wearing another, was married in a few of them, started running in one of them until it literally broke. The smallest legs look sad and stained and from another era—say, late 1880s mining town.

Having a piece of the body that is made by someone else (for me, always a man) is a strange experience—think the opposite of being fitted for a fancy and fabulous dress. For a while, these objects belonged to me, they were literally part of me, but I understood it was time to do something playful and artistic with them.

Rob—my friend of 20 plus years now—and I are serious about making these lamps, and the idea makes me a bit giddy. To take an object that was necessary for my body to go anywhere or to do anything, but was also seen as a flaw or a weakness or a source of shame and make it a source of LIGHT? Yes. It’s so much more interesting than hiding it away in a box.

I’ve always believed that whatever we make or create goes out into the world to have its own life. Although those legs were not my original pieces of artwork (they were made by Bill, Bob, and another Bill, my prosthetists throughout the decades, all of whom are now retired), I wore them into the world, I gave them life and travel and adventure and activity, and now they’ll move into the world in a far different—and fun—way

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