Nothing screams “ugly” like a prostate cancer cell. So who in their right mind would really want a lamp shaped like one?

Well, first-year visual art student Chloe Deroy has a friend who has called first dibs on the lamp she made, which looks like an enlarged image of a microscopic cancer cell – with a purple light bulb sticking out of it.

“She likes it because she thought it was well-executed,” Deroy said, “not because she has a thing for prostate cancer cells.”

Deroy is part of a sculpture class that was assigned to create the ugliest lamp the students could imagine. Their creations, in all their grotesque glory, are currently on display in the gallery of the School of Visual Arts LeBel Building. If you’d like to see them, you’d better hurry; today is the last day of the exhibition before judges decide which is the most revolting and award an as-yet unnamed hideous prize to the winner of the ghastliest lamp.

Deroy made her lamp from old socks soaked in Plaster of Paris, formed over light bulbs, glued together and then built over an old table lamp. A pallid shade of greyish brown, it is truly horrific to behold.

“I wanted to do something that no one would be able to argue was beautiful,” she said. “It’s definitely not something you’d want hanging on the wall of your house.”

Alex Tavolieri-Essex, who made his lamp from a mannequin adorned with the tackiest sweater he could find at a used clothing shop, said the project provoked his conventional thinking about art.

“Art is usually meant to be something beautiful,” he said. “You don’t really want people to think it’s ugly. So this sort of challenges the art world.”

Danielle Bertrand, who welded colorful pieces of scrap metal to an upside down wire waste basket, sounded mildly disappointed as she described her creation.

“It actually turned out kind of nice, which is unfortunate,” she said, adding that her mother kind of likes it. “But I don’t think it’s something she wants to put up in her house.”

Check out a video on the exhibition: