“I wholeheartedly am a Twihard”: Janie Korn’s candles based on humour, celebrities and the early 2000’s

There’s no way that you could ever want to burn one of Janie Korn’s candles. Whimsical, detailed and artfully rugged, she creates all sorts of characters from Aphex Twin, Paul Smith, Clippy™ (the office assistant from Microsoft), relics from The Simpsons, or the vibrating love bed in The Sims. Not to mention baby Renesmee from Twilight’s Breaking Dawn, which have all amounted to numerous features in the likes of The New York Times, Vogue, New York Magazine, Interview, Refinery29, plus commissions for brands such as United Masters, Nordstrom and Amelie Pichard.

Based in New York, art has always run as an undercurrent to Janie’s childhood. Candle-making and creating things on the wider spectrum wasn’t something that she expected to pursue in her younger years, despite the fact that she long held a strong affinity to graphic novels and old Betty Boop cartoons. “I idolised Harvey Pikar in high-school because he, like me, is from Ohio and a little depressive,” she tells It’s Nice That. When it came to the pivotal moment of post-school, Janie decided against art school in fear that it would be limiting and “ultimately make a happy life untenable.” Instead, Janie studied Spanish and Latin American studies in Baltimore and endeavoured to work in non-profits for the foreign service. “I had lots of odd jobs after graduating, some using my degree, some supporting other artists, and some that were just unrelated and entirely terrible.”

Luckily, art was a flame that she kept alight throughout this period in time, deciding to put all her efforts into the one thing that really gave her validation and pleasure. That thing is the wonderful art of making candles, a practice that she first arrived at two years ago after a stint in sculpture and animation: “I wanted to make something that could be held, burned, eaten, broken or enjoyed in another intimate capacity,” she says. “For a few months I flirted with the idea of sculptural food, but I kept eating my ingredients, like, in bulk quantities. So I transitioned my work to my secondary concept, candles.”

We’ve seen a rise in lockdown crafts, such as that of candle dipping and moulding, but none have come close to the precision and humour found in Janie’s designs – that which sparks nostalgia just as much as it spurs on a laugh. In this case, it’s unsurprising to hear that her interests are mainly rooted in humour and celebrities, particularly tabloid culture of the early 2000s. “Little weird things that I find funny and idiosyncratic,” she says on the specificities. This probably justifies her choice in subject, be it Goofy, Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie, Elizabeth Warren or Kendall Roy, each of which has been selected via curiosity and because Janie feels they deserve to be re-examined.

The process for turning these flecks of humour into a physical candle is amazingly mould-free. To begin, Janie – who’s currently working right outside of her bedroom – starts her day off by sweeping and scraping the wax from her work table. “Wax just travels everywhere,” she says, even if she finds the sweeping and scraping to be quite the therapeutic activity. Typically, Janie likes to draft up a plan of action before sitting down, a move that sets things up and means she avoids idly sitting at her desk eating snacks. Once this has been accomplished, that’s where the candle making process truly starts. “It’s a process of tempering wax, blending with pigment, building it up, carving it down and then repeating. You have to work at the right speed to maintain everything at the temperature it needs to be at, or else things will just melt or crumble. It’s sort of a dance.”

Janie’s pieces of late include a Panera bread bowl, “you know, where they scoop out the innards of a loaf of bread, fill it with soup, and top if off with a little bread hat”. She looks back to high-school where she’d hang out in Panera for hours with her friends, refilling their coffees and eating the free bread samples. “Bread bowls in general are very Midwestern to be, so I think it reveals a little bit of my cultural identity.” Then there’s the inimitable Renesmee candle, more specifically Edward and Bella’s baby from Twilight. “In the movies they used this CGI doll thing instead of a real human. She’s so funny to me,” she says, noting how she always bases her selections on that which doesn’t seem overtly mocking. “I earnestly, wholeheartedly, am a Twihard.”

Avoiding sarcasm or anything too on the nose, Janie hopes her audience will take a moment out of their days to humorously muse on the symbology and characterisation addressed throughout her candle work. This is especially prevalent among the iconography of the burning wick: “which would suggest eventual immolation, if the selection is clearly of something despicable,” she concludes. “I feel like the whole piece would read as pretty didactic. In other words, ‘I don’t like this thing, I want to destroy it with a fire’. That’s not my intention. If anything, the flame to me symbolises reflection, much like the tension behind lots of other ceremonial candles.”