Dan Lam, sculptures that should not be able to stand
Drip Check is the series where I look at artists whose work drips harder than mine. I invented drip tufting, so I feel responsible for the whole neighbourhood. We start with the artist whose sculptures made me stare at my phone for a full minute, the first time and every time since. Dan Lam.
The work
Dan Lam is an American sculptor based in Texas, known for glossy, drippy forms that seem to be caught mid-melt. A blob slides over the edge of a shelf and freezes there, dressed in a neon gradient and often studded with soft spikes. The pieces look impossible in two directions at once. Too liquid to be solid, too solid to be dripping. That tension is the whole magic. You can find her work at bydanlam.com and on Instagram.
What I see as a maker
Everyone sees the drip. What I look at is the gradient. Her colour transitions stay clean across a curved, glossy surface, which is brutally hard to control, and the palettes are fearless in exactly the way I love, sherbet pinks into acid greens into ultraviolet. In my language her pieces are Pools with Springs, colour that has come to rest but still feels alive.
The drip connection
Her work and mine agree on the core idea, that a form caught while losing its shape holds more energy than a finished one. The difference is material and time. Her surfaces are seamless and fast, mine are built from thousands of single threads, so the gradient becomes granular, a slow physical pixel version of the same melt. What I take from her is courage in the palette. Nature gives me my gradients, Dan Lam reminds me not to be polite with them.
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Five of five drips. The neighbourhood has a queen, and the first Drip Check bows to her.
Drip Check continues, in the Journal and as a weekly video series on Instagram. If you know an artist whose work belongs here, send them my way.