Old candles, new fire.

This project was undertaken as part of a one-class assignment in a sculpture course I took a few years ago. The premise was to collect items in one's home, bring them to class, and make something of them within that one class. The result was a class full of "garbage sculptures". It was pretty neat.

I wanted to carve something... I assume that all vegans occasionally long to barbarically hack into something with a blade of some kind. Or maybe I just personally like breaking things. Either way, I looked around my home and office for something to carve. What I found was a bunch of left over candle wax... all different colours and some laced with delicious aromatic oils. I always have a lot of aromatic candles mainly because I have one of the most flatulent dogs on the planet.

I melted all of the lumps of wax together using a double boiler. In the top part of the boiler I placed half of a used orange juice carton, into which I placed the wax to melt. After the wax melted, I let it cool into a solid block, which was easily released from the waxy carton.

The resulting block of wax was reddish brown, with visible ribbons of blue and green. It was very meaty looking, and being a bit of a romantic, I decided to carve a heart - arteries and all.



The process of carving released the aromatic oils trapped in the block. The studio quickly started to smell of chocolate and peppermint. Students and the prof gathered to understand the olfactory nature of my project. I got a very good mark on the project, despite the rudimentary nature of the carving. I believe this is because my teacher could appreciate the delicious process of it's creation.

Currently, I'm collecting another mass of wax to replicate the project. I'm hoping to be able to make a candle and not just a sculpture this time, by including a weighted wick into the container.