CANCELED – Emollience: form, function, ephemera. Wax Candle Making with artist Bruno Smith

Join Artspace New Haven and artist Bruno Smith for a candle-making workshop. Wax is one of the most elastic art-making materials. When heated, it becomes a liquid that surrounds or contains a form. As it cools, it solidifies and takes the shape of whatever it touches. We will look at different modes of making a candle: pouring, dipping, and molding. Working intuitively, or with a found vessel, we will create unique candles that will ultimately burn away as they provide us light. In the process of making something we can call our own, we must reconcile with its ephemerality.

The artist encourages participants to bring: 1) vessels that can be broken/cut & can withstand heat (glass, tin cans, aluminum, heat resistant rubber) 2)inclusions that won’t burn in low heat and are non-toxic (seashells, metal trinkets, glitter, flowers).

This in-person free public program is held in conjunction with the exhibition, Ilana Harris-Babou: Revelations, on view September 17–December 3, 2022. For in-person programs, Artspace encourages mask-wearing and social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19 within our community. 

Bruno Smith is a Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist born in New York City. He received his BFA at SAIC (2012), and his MFA at Rutgers University Mason Gross (2021). With family roots in Brownsville, Texas and Mexico City, Smith searches for a universal language amidst the logos and signs that saturate our environments. Stripping everyday symbols from their original consumer context in the U.S. or Mexico, Smith builds a hieroglyphic language to reflect on time, decomposition, and the very nature of the materials used to construct his work. In repurposing everyday refuse, Smith memorializes the discarded and explores their beingness in the world.