Sculptor creates a fantastical world

The drive up into the hills north of Enderby is blasted with colour –– Douglas maple, Western larch, Black cottonwood dot the landscape as the road twists and turns.

For Stephan Bircher who calls this area home, it’s a perfect burial landscape for creatures large and small to find their final resting place. He has spent many hours digging through the dirt and lifting up rocks to uncover these delicate remains among other treasures that nature has left behind.

The glassy wings of butterflies, feathers, shriveled leaves, abandoned shells, even road kill, have all entered the realm of Bircher’s mind and eventually into his studio.

A sculptor, lighting designer, theatrical wunderkind, and alchemist when it comes to fusing nature with human-made objects, Bircher could be considered a kind of mad scientist or a post-modern Jim Henson.

Far from being a “Muppet” lab, his studio is a fantastical place where lit up skeletal creatures spin like whirling dervishes and play musical instruments, their intricate parts held together by magnets, springs, cogs and cranks, and run by small motors.

“I like to take the magic out of my surroundings; that’s how my sculptures develop,” said Bircher. “The bones in my work, and whatever else I find out here, come from my youth of always going out into the wilderness. When I was walking around I would always see things a little differently, of what could be made from nature.”

Growing up near Basel, Switzerland, Bircher says he was always tinkering when he wasn’t rebelling.

The son of a surgeon, he says his parents had high hopes for their son, but Bircher preferred drawing cartoons in his sketch book than attending to his academic studies.

“I had an endless struggle in my school days,” he said. “I found what I wanted by myself, sometimes it was negative. I was not always matching what was expected of me. But I was always drawn to creativity.”

On family holidays, Bircher would go to the house of his aunt in the mountains, where he would make fantasy villages out of things he would find.

“They were more abstract, while my brother made functional steamboats,” he said.

After high school, Bircher travelled to India on what was supposed to be a short holiday. He ended up staying two years.

India was everything Bircher’s upbringing wasn’t: crowded, noisy and chaotic.

“I think it’s this experience, out of my family who were open-minded but always tried to make things organized, that shaped me. I loved it.”

After returning home to Switzerland, Bircher would eventually go on to teach at a day school. His subjects were handicrafts and sports. He also helped his students with numerous extracurricular projects such as hand-building a unicycle.

Solar LED Lights

Before discussing solar LED lights, let us first understand what LED lights are. LED is the abbreviated term for Light Emitting Diode which is actually a chemical substance that is capable of emitting light if it is supplied with electricity. LED technology has come a long way from being used as an indicator to even being used in television sets these days. What has made LEDs most popular is their ability to emit a great amount of light while producing an insignificant amount of heat. They are also extremely cost-efficient and energy-efficient because not only do LED lights last for thousands of hours, they also use up only a fraction of the power that the other more standard sources of light do. As it is should be evident now that LED lights are a great way to save both energy as well as money in the long term, it is time to explain the association of solar technology with the LED lighting technology.

If you use solar LED lights, you can eliminate even the relatively small charges that an LED light would otherwise put on your electricity bill. If one can put together a technology that lasts for a long time while using only a small amount of electrical power with a technology that allows unlimited electrical power from the largest renewable energy source on the planet, then it is a very advanced and powerful technology indeed. If properly utilized, then solar LED lights can replace the conventional street lights as well as residential outdoor lights. The technology from the outset however, is as simple as attaching a photo voltaic cell to a LED light to make it independent of the grid electricity. What makes powering LED lights with solar cells easier is the fact that the LEDs do not require the current to be converted to AC from DC in order to run. As a result of being independent from the conventional sources of electricity, these solar LED lights are also wireless, which is an added advantage of course.

As is the case with most solar powered lighting systems, these are also made mainly for outdoor uses like street lighting, garden lighting, deck lighting and other similar purposes. The outdoor nature of the solar LED lights often makes it a necessity that they be made waterproof as well to withstand the climatic conditions. The only reason as to why people may not choose to install solar LED lights can be the relatively high costs, but that too is mostly one time because they hardly ever need maintenance. Apart from lasting a very long time, Solar LED lights will cost you nothing to use as you would be utilizing the free energy stored within sunlight to power them without even attending to the procedure. If you are a person who is conscious of the environment, then you should have more reasons for preferring the solar LED lights because they are harmless to the environment as they do not emit greenhouse gases or use up non-renewable sources of energy.