This post started as an installment for my Tweet of the Day series, because, given my oft-stated love of bicycles, I couldn’t pass up a bicycle-related tweet by Colossal‘s Christopher Jobson:

Then, I considered it for my Eycatchers series, given how cool the photos of these chandeliers (see more below) are:

But really, this post is truly best suited for my Upcycling series.

For, as artist Carolina Fontoura Alzaga explains in the video below, she has lofty goals for her work, goals that extend beyond the aesthetic, goals to promote the value of recycling, reusing, repurposing, upcycling.

There’s something SO cool about these chandeliers, how they appear at once modern and old at the same time. Alzaga describes them as inspired by Victorian-era aesthetics, but I look at them and they seem to go WAY further back than that, like they could be very much at home in a castle, in the company of chainmail and armor.

One thing’s for sure, as you watch the artist at work, whether salvaging bicycle parts from the dump, stripping the parts down and organizing them in her shop, or constructing, welding, painting and assembling the finished pieces, it’s clear that Alzaga is a powerful woman who might very well get her message across.

Here are some more images of her work, followed by a video about the artist.