Vintage Ceramic Jabba Lamp

There were a number of pieces like this made in the late 70s and early 80s featuring various Star Wars characters. (Here’s a good entry on the SWCA about this genre of collecting.). These would have all been made by amateurs, probably at “paint your own pottery” kinds of businesses that were fairly common in the 70s and 80s.

I’m not positive if these were pre-made pieces that people would just glaze and otherwise decorate, or if there were molds that allowed people to make them from scratch. I’m leaning toward the former. Mine has a name carved in the bottom (“M. Meyers”).

This is really only a lamp in the loosest sense of the word, and in fact I consider it a statue more than anything. It had two Christmas lights on a cord with a switch stuffed inside, but there’s no place for the light to get out except on the bottom, so I’m not sure what the person who made it was thinking. I removed the cord since it was easy to do so without breaking anything (it was just sort of loose inside) and didn’t look like it would function in any case.

I have also seen one of these made up to be a proper lamp with a shade and everything. You can see that the bottom does have a recessed area that would presumably allow the piece to sit flat on a table even with a cord sticking out, so I do think they had this kind of thing in mind when they sculpted it.

In any case, it’s a pretty cool piece of unlicensed sculpture, and fairly large at about 9″ tall and wide. It is a little spooky, though. I get sort of a hypnotoad vibe from it…