Candlestick c. 1940

Editor: So, here we have Mary Hansen’s “Candlestick” from around 1940, a pencil drawing. There's something stark about its simplicity; it really highlights the form of the object itself. What do you see in this piece? Curator: What interests me immediately is the explicit rendering of this mundane object using the traditions of academic art. A candlestick, mass-produced perhaps, subject to the painstaking labour of a pencil drawing. Why? The tension lies in that contradiction. Editor: So you're saying the choice of subject matter is significant in relation to the skill employed? Curator: Precisely. Academic drawing, historically a skill taught for replicating grand subjects – history painting, portraits of the elite. But here, the labour is directed at something commonplace, something that may well have been industrially manufactured. It asks us to consider value, doesn’t it? What do we consider worthy of such dedicated craft? And what's the social implication of depicting a manufactured, maybe even bought object? Editor: That’s a fascinating perspective. I hadn’t considered the socio-economic context embedded in the drawing itself. It’s making me rethink the connection between art, labour and ordinary objects. Curator: And consider how the materiality of the drawing - the humble pencil on paper - emphasizes the 'making' of the object anew. It questions the role of the artist in a world increasingly shaped by industrial production and mass consumption. Editor: I'm going to look at pencil drawings very differently from now on! This conversation's shown me that even a seemingly simple still life like this can hold such rich meaning if you consider the labor and material culture surrounding it.