From Sketch to Scent: Building a Candle Like an Artwork

Early sketches and scent testing for Nowhere

“Each candle begins as a sketch — a mood, a line, a quiet idea that won’t sit still.”

I don’t really start with wax or wicks. I start with an idea — a mood, a texture, sometimes a line I scribbled in a notebook months ago that’s been haunting me ever since. My candles begin the same way my drawings, films, or ceramics do: with a thought that refuses to sit quietly.

When I say each scent starts as a sketch, I mean it literally. I’ll draw the shape of the feeling — quick pencil gestures that look like nothing but mean everything. The smoke, the hush, the hum of a certain kind of night. Then I ask: what does this smell like? What does Nowhere smell like? Or Bad Poem? Or Pipe Dream? The answer is never one note — it’s layers that build and blur until they feel like a place you’ve been before, even if you can’t remember when.

Once I have a sketch that feels right, I start building it in scent. This is where things get fabulously unscientific. I’ll mix oils until the studio smells like an alchemist’s fever dream: cedar, coffee, tobacco, lavender, citrus — bottles open everywhere, my desk a crime scene of aroma. I think of it like colour mixing: add too much of one hue and you lose the balance; too little and it feels incomplete. Sometimes I nail it immediately. Usually, I don’t.

The first successful test pour always feels like a tiny miracle. You light it, wait for the melt pool, and suddenly the room changes temperature. It’s alive. It’s become the thing it was supposed to be all along. The rest of the process — wicking, pouring, labelling, boxing — is more like choreography than manufacturing. Every move is deliberate but imperfect, because I still pour everything by hand in my Vancouver studio. There’s always a little variance, a little signature. I like that. Perfection’s boring.

People often ask if I consider the candles art objects. I never know how to answer that. They’re too domestic to be sculptures, too ephemeral to be paintings. But they behave like art to me — they change space, they hold memory, they invite you to feel something. The difference is you get to burn these. You get to participate in their disappearance. That feels beautiful to me.

I guess that’s the fun part — the way an object can come and go but the moment stays. The scent lingers in your sweater, your hair, your couch cushions. You find traces of it days later and remember the night you lit it. That’s the kind of work I want to make: not permanent, but unforgettable.

Each scent is a study in time and texture. Night Cap smells like staying up too late with your best ideas — whiskey, ink, smoke, ambition. Toadstool smells like fog and red earth, walking through the woods when everything’s damp and ancient. Pipe Dream is the city at midnight: citrus, amber, the hum of a record playing somewhere down the hall. They’re moods you can live in for a while.

So yes, I make candles. But really, I make gestures. Temporary sculptures. A little light, a little scent, a little reminder that everyday objects can still feel like art if you let them.

Matty