Wax carving doesn’t tolerate haste and it notices immediately when you’re rushing.

At my bench, I am convinced that time behaves differently. There’s no shortcut through a form and no way to skip the moment where the blade or file meets resistance and you have to decide—cut deeper, stop, or change direction entirely. Wax carving absolutely insists on presence. It asks you to slow your breathing, steady your hands, and stay long enough to see what the material is becoming.

In a culture that increasingly orbits the technological superhighway of unfathomable speed, this feels almost transgressive. I recently read a book called "24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep" by Jonathan Crary and he discusses the ceaseless pursuit of productivity and the attention economy essentially coming to the conclusion that the late-capitalist day has no edges, no borders, no boundary line upon which to state 'I've had enough."

Within this edgeless space of daily life there is always another notification, another task to complete and of course there is always another thing to buy. Even rest and relaxation are framed as optimisation: if you get better sleep, if you have better routines, if you are stricter...you will be happier and healthier and most likely get that promotion quicker!

I love crafting, I love making things because these skills that are laborious and take a very long time to master - like wax carving for instance simply don't care about any of that. 

You can’t carve wax while half-listening to someone else. You can’t scroll and carve. You can’t rush through it without consequence. The material records everything: impatience shows up as gouges, distraction as slips, over-thinking as hesitation. Wax doesn’t punish you, but it does remember. In my classes I often remind my pupils that wax carving is like cutting your hair in the dark after drinking a bottle of wine. Presence, concentration and focus are key. 

In The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han writes about a world where we are no longer oppressed by external forces, but by our own internalised demand to perform, improve, and produce. We become both labourer and taskmaster, endlessly pushing ourselves until exhaustion feels normal.

At the bench, that logic breaks down.

Wax carving offers resistance—not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet, physical one. The blade slows. The surface pushes back. You are reminded that not everything can be optimised, scaled, or made more efficient without losing something essential. Time here is not a resource to be managed.

There’s a moment, usually after the first few rough cuts, when carving becomes rhythmic. Not fast, not slow—just steady. This is the kind of time that rarely exists elsewhere. Not the frantic urgency of deadlines, and not the numb scrolling of supposed rest, but something more embodied. Time that moves at the pace of hands and attention.

This is why wax carving feels restorative for so many people, even when the work itself is demanding. It returns you to a scale where your actions matter immediately and visibly. A cut is a cut. A decision stays made. There’s no infinite undo, no version history to hide behind. That finality is not stressful—it’s grounding.

In contrast to a system that thrives on endless choice and constant acceleration, wax asks for commitment. It asks you to stay with a form long enough to understand it, to accept that some ideas only reveal themselves slowly. In doing so, it offers something increasingly rare: a sense of sufficiency. This is enough. This moment is enough. This piece of time, shaped by your hands, is complete.

Perhaps that’s why handmade objects feel different when you wear them. They carry the tempo of their making. They hold time that wasn’t squeezed, fragmented, or extracted—but lived through, patiently, at a bench.

Wax carving doesn’t reject the modern world outright. It simply refuses to move at its speed. And in that refusal, it opens a small but meaningful space—one where time is not something to outrun, but something to listen to.

Ask on wax, and it will tell you when to slow down.