The Prickly Lamp embodies the adaptive reuse capabilities that have made Lucy McRae’s work as a body architect famous. The work adds a protective skin to a floor light, transforming it into a new creature capable of intense labour and self-preservation, two qualities essential for women wanting to survive the harsh conditions common during the Australian colonial period.

For Broached Colonial, Lucy McRae looked back at the living conditions of convict women and found the culture of the main settlements, such as Parramatta, exploitative and brutal. McRae’s work as a body architect sees her invent skins and limbs for currently unknown environments. The result was the creation of a skin made from the simplest domestic objects — a stealthy looking creature, armoured with wooden spikes.

The Prickly Lamp is the metaphorical skin made visible of any person who has been forced to make dramatic changes to adapt to a hostile foreign culture. McRae has taken simple objects and made an ornate, finely detailed armour out of them, an echidna-like skin that wards off potential predators.