Branding as Material

Sometimes I wonder when a candle stops being an artwork and starts being a product — or if those things are even separate anymore. I used to think commercialization meant compromise: that the more visible or sellable something became, the less soul it carried. But lately, I’m not so sure. Maybe the tension itself is the practice.

There’s something almost pop about the idea of taking a deeply personal process — scent, gesture, touch — and turning it into something you can barcode. It’s absurd and fascinating at once. Every label I design, every scent name I choose, every box that lands on a shelf becomes another layer in the work. Branding has become its own material, as malleable and expressive as wax or paper.

When I first started MFA Candles, I wanted each one to feel like a small sculpture — something handmade, imperfect, a piece of the studio you could hold. Now I see the brand as a larger installation in motion. The packaging, the website, even the way people photograph the candles in their homes — they’re all part of the piece. The candle burns down, but the image circulates. The work continues in a different form.

I think about Andy Warhol a lot — how he turned commerce into a mirror, how repetition became language. There’s a similar echo in small-batch making today. You repeat yourself over and over — pour, label, pack — until the act becomes a performance. It’s industrial, but intimate. The copies are never identical; the brand becomes a kind of living print.

Sometimes I miss when it was just me and a few glass jars, no logo, no audience. But there’s also something beautiful about seeing the work out in the world — how it moves, how it’s interpreted. Commercialization doesn’t erase soul; it just redistributes it. The brand becomes a vessel for feeling, scaled and repeated but still rooted in care.

So now I approach branding the way I approach art — not as a layer of polish, but as another raw material. Each choice is sculptural, performative, and deeply personal. The goal isn’t to hide behind aesthetics, but to make them speak — to let design carry the same honesty as scent or flame.

Maybe that’s what this practice is now: finding humanity inside systems meant to flatten it. Building an object that can exist in both worlds — the shelf and the studio, the market and the mind.

Matty