Lockdown Candles
The Twist candle by Lex Pott (image: Choreo).
The Rotterdam-based designer Lex Pott disappears from the Zoom grid, then remerges holding two wax objects. “Two or three years ago we launched these Pillar candles for Hay,” he says. But these aren’t exactly the exuberant, Memphis- inspired colour block candles on sale at Hay. The candles Pott holds to the screen look like tired, saggy versions of themselves, as if they’ve spent a year in self-isolation, staring at screens for too long.
Pott explains that their warped shape is due to thermodynamics rather than broken spirits. “There was a big heat wave in 2019, and we had these Pillar candles here in the studio,” he says. “It became 40°C plus, and that’s a temperature that candles don’t like.” The more Pott looked at the droopy candles, the more they piqued his curiosity. “I realised that wax has this in-between state,” he says. “Of course we know it mostly in solid and liquid forms, but in this in-between state it almost becomes clay.” This was the germ of the idea for his latest candle project, Twist.
Twist consists of a single-wicked double-ended candle which keeps its two ends upright by coiling artfully at the centre. It is not dipped, but extruded (“basically the same way you’d make a sausage”) with blocks of wax fed through a special machine. It is then heated to 40-50°C – heatwave temperature – and moulded. “It sounds really easy, but it took us three months to figure everything out: what type of wax, what kind of wick, what kind of mould,” explains Pott.
Those three months of R&D were well-timed. In February 2020, Pott presented Twist and related experiments at Object, a small Dutch fair. “That was actually one of the last fairs before Corona kicked in,” he remembers. “One or two weeks later, the world was a different place.” While the studio’s other projects were variously cancelled or stalled, Twist took off. “Everybody was at home and wanted an affordable design object to cheer up their houses.”
Twist is eminently Instagram-friendly, and got a lot of traction there first. “Then TikTok came,” says Pott. Throughout 2020, #twistedcandles tutorials began popping up on the video-sharing platform. “It was like Instagram times 10. And lots of young people were copying the Twist in a charming, DIY way.” The tutorials tended to work with store-bought dining candles, and couldn’t get the length or exact shape of Pott’s candle. Pott didn’t mind, however. The level of engagement with his design was staggering, and entirely new to him.
“It was always a dream of mine to initiate, produce, and distribute a project on my own, totally independently and without any marketing or other companies involved,” says Pott. “And well, we did it!” Production and distribution eventually outgrew the capacities of Pott’s studio, however. “It was out of control. The studio was packed to the max: boxes, pallets, wax everywhere!” Today, a US company called 54 Celsius – heatwave temperature! – manages the production and distribution of Twist. “I can’t look at candles anymore,” laughs Pott, presumably tired from having been burning the candle at both ends since launching Twist.
Words Kristina Rapacki
Photographs Choreo
This article was originally published in Disegno #29. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.