“Loose Thoughts and Chained Candles”, a response to tend, tended, tender

There’s an old factory between Ōtepoti and Mosgiel. The exterior is all shattered surfaces, and teenagers break into the derelict building at night. Candles are found on the stone floor, a sign of gatherings amid the industrial past. 

The steel frame looked like a roll cage until Taarn refashioned it as a chandelier.

It’s hard to know how best to refer to Taarn’s creations. The making and protocols are not easily understood. The rituals they belong to—appear long forgotten, or yet to be discovered. 

Still, once the candle is lit, the proceedings will have to be short. There is time, perhaps, for one incantation before the vessel extinguishes the flame in a shallow porcelain body.

In medieval Europe, candles were an important measure of time.  Lines were etched on the wax to represent the hours burnt, and steel candle holders guided the pre-modern mind on the night’s progress.

Beeswax was the most coveted of all the substances used to wrap a wick. The gentle fragrance was sought for the rooms of nobility, and—more poignantly—reserved for the invocation of Christ through the sacraments at the altar.

The peasants would burn animal fat. These "tallow candles" were predominant among the working classes until the invention of paraffin. The petroleum burnt clean.

  “Some land is destroyed to save other lands,” begins Ryan Juskus. These ‘Sacrificial Zones’ are a new ecological classification, one with roots in theologically inspired environmental justice movements:

“...sacrifice, derived from the Latin ‘to make sacred,’ is polysemous, signifying both violent victimisation and sacred life. This explains why some activists have employed the sacrifice zone concept to generate a positive vision for transforming sacrifice zones into sacred zones.”

     Ornamentation can be compulsion.

The thought comes to me as wax drips onto the brass cherub atop my writing desk. The candle is carried above a Grecian urn balanced on the cherub’s head. The little angel—kept in my family since childhood—exists in the precious condominium of early objects.  Every contour recited and memorised through young eyes.

Renaissance kitsch—couldn’t be further from Taarn creations.

In Taarn’s notes, there is mention of a Te Papa article: New Zealand’s Native Bees — Quiet lives of desperation. The curator of invertebrates offers a plain summary ending in a “What can I do?” section for the 28-species of Ngaro Huruhuru. The key difference of native bees to their introduced counterparts appears to be their solitary lives—they don’t fly long distances, they don’t communicate with their relatives, and they don’t have honey as a food reserve. 

Beehives are anthropomorphic habitations.

A bee’s own home is called a nest, and these structures are generally amalgams. Caves, rock cavities, and hollow trees all make suitable nesting sites. Nests are typically situated 1 to 5 metres above the ground. 

Grace’s ceiling is 4.2 metres high.

A knight runs into a spider’s web. The strength of the figure is undone, the armour is ensnared in the filaments. The iron cascades down into the trap, hanging as lace. 

John Ward Knox’s Hardly Held Lightly (2015) comes to mind. The artist weaved more than a kilometer of industrial chain into web-weavings that adjoined the museum and nearby trees. In Knox’s artwork, the imagining is of a robotic arachnid extruding a perfect line of steel.

If there is a category to be applied to the forms, it is, perhaps, extraterrestrial. Certainly of the earth, they are nonetheless much more than the earth. The association with alien life seems unlikely—until I recall that space shuttles are coated in clay tiles, allowing the craft to endure the temperatures of re-entry. There is horror within the forms, as often occurs with organisms that overfill with life. 

Taarn seems to carry this excess.

- Emil Scheffmann