Arian Karami

I was five years old when I first walked into the Iranian Children and Adolescents Intellectual Development Center in Tehran. They gave me clay, paint, and time. That is where I learned that making something with your hands is a kind of language.

Over the next twenty-five years, I spoke that language in different forms — sculpture, painting, music, poetry. For most of that time, I thought music was my path. Sculpture stayed in the background. A hobby. A habit I couldn’t quite put down.

Everything changed when I met Yasmin.

Yasmin Ghane Basiri is my wife. Her father, Professor Mohsen Ghane Basiri, is a chemist, researcher, writer, and philosopher — one of the enduring figures in contemporary Iranian thought. It was through them that I found candle-making. At twenty-nine, I lit my first wick. A year later, Yasmin and I were running a small industrial candle production in Iran called Yasmin Candles.

The business grew quickly. Orders came in for larger and larger pieces — candles that were no longer jars or pillars, but objects that people wanted to display. That is when it clicked for me. The sculpture I had set aside for decades was asking to come back — but through wax.

I spent years experimenting with that idea. Combining the art of sculpture with the craft of candle-making. Treating each candle not as a product but as a piece, sculpted and finished by hand. No molds pulled from a catalogue. No design borrowed from someone else. Most of the forms I shape are drawn from nature — faces, bodies, trees, animals — the things that have always been my first teachers.

In time, the political situation in Iran made it impossible to stay. Yasmin and I left everything we had built and came to Canada. For the past five years, we have lived in Vancouver, rebuilding quietly.

Titan Candles is the next chapter.

The name is simple. Every piece I make is scaled to stand like a figure — large, heavy, present. A titan, in the oldest sense of the word: something built to endure.

Each candle is sculpted by hand in my Vancouver studio. No two are alike. Some are meant to burn. Most are meant to be kept. Whichever you choose is yours.

— Arian