The Archaeology
of Objects

CANDLES

A conversation with Dan Arps.

One of my earliest memories of living with a Dan Arps work isn’t glamorous. Our cat pee’d on it. The acid in the urine burned right through the paint, leaving a scar across the surface. We sent it back to Dan and he kindly repainted it. That story sums up his practice in a way: nothing is too precious to be destroyed, repaired, or reborn.

Dan’s work thrives in that messy space between fragility and permanence. He digs through the overlooked corners of urban life. Bike paths, building sites, half-forgotten materials, and reworks them into something uncanny, layered, and alive.

“I’m interested in the city and the things that go on in it,” Dan tells me. “When I come into the studio, I try to distill that down, make situations that feel like the urban spaces I’m drawn to. Sometimes I’ll amp them up, sometimes I’ll just play with them.”

For him, play is key. “I try to be open to whatever’s happening. If something sparks, I’ll follow it. I studied sculpture, so even when I make wall works they’re sculptural at heart. They’re never flat. I like embedding old works into new ones, layering them up like archaeology.”

The analogy feels perfect: cities built on cities, new facades covering old bones. “Things are always embedded in other things,” he says. “It just goes on forever.”

Dan’s studio is a laboratory of unlikely materials. A truckload of recycled polystyrene from a Whangārei project became a resource he’s still working through.

He experiments constantly: plaster mixed with paper pulp, cement coatings that turn foam into fake concrete, EVA clay that feels like slime in your hands and rubber when it dries. “I’ve got a few tricks. Spray paint, washes, dry brushing, but usually it’s really simple stuff. It’s more about being curious than secret formulas.”

When we asked him to create a vessel for Deadly Ponies’ first candle, Dan reached for something unexpected: novelty egg cups. “They’d been in my studio for years,” he explains. “They’re already vessels, already industrially made, so they were a natural starting point. I blew one up to the right size, layered it with EVA clay, painted and reshaped it until it felt right. Then I played with 3D scanning, letting digital errors add their own character.”

The result is an object that sits comfortably in both worlds: sculpture and design, unique artwork and reproducible form.

“Artworks have to last. That’s often harder than you’d think, because the materials I love want to rot, melt, or fall apart. Casting is about fixing them, making them permanent. But you’ve got to be brave. Casting means destroying one thing to make another. You can’t be too precious.”

Towards the end of our chat, I asked what excites him about making an everyday object like a candle.

“I think a lot about the strange lives objects have,” he said. “This vessel might last a hundred years. Maybe one ends up in a landfill, maybe it gets dug up like some ancient shard. That’s at the heart of what I do, following these threads without fully understanding them, and trusting the process.”

Dan may call himself a “slacker,” but the truth is his work carries a quiet intensity. It’s playful, yes, but also deeply considered. Each object is layered with time and history. Like the cities he draws inspiration from, his work is never finished. It just keeps evolving.