Lightbulb to Candle: Trevor Hinton's recycled art project

Hello my name is Trevor Hinton and I am a junior at Science Leadership Academy, our quarter one art benchmark was to take something we find and use everyday and transform it into recycled art.

For my recycled art project I decided to take a old lightbulb and transform it into a usable candle. The inspiration for this came about when I was searching the internet for ideas and came across an interesting picture of a glossed out lightbulb with a candle light coming out of the bottom in which I then began to search around to find instructions as to how I could complete this myself. The materials that were needed were old lightbulbs, a screw driver, needle nose pliers, gloves for safety and a knife. I wanted to make my lightbulb candle look a lot different from the one that was displayed on the website so I tried looking for different color candle waxes and illuminates  so that when the candle was ignited it gave off a different color other than the standard orange flame. When I began this project what seemed like a fairly easy task of pulling apart the bottom of a lightbulb soon turned into a big mess because of broken glass, filaments going missing, wax being poured into wrong ends etc. etc. However I did learn from this a better understanding of not only how candles work on the inside but also how artist carefully need to plan out each step when creating a work of art from something else, I found myself many nights wondering if this project would actually even come out like a lightbulb and if in fact it would even work.

Although I was unable to fully finish the project and light my candle, I was able to gain valuable experience from this and that when working with recycled items it brings about a certain joy knowing that what your goals are for the piece and what you are aiming to complete may be able to be used on a daily basis and that what you are working with didn't end up in a landfill or someones trashcan. I really like that this project was giving to us and hope that we can continue to complete projects like this in the future.