Seeking modern Black representation in candle art, a Charlotte woman found her niche
Bailiwick Studio, which features candle sculptures representing modern African American culture, is the brain child of Summerlin Gillam, a Charlotte resident who received her college degree in interior design. She embodies the phrase “necessity is the Mother of invention.”
Gillam, 42, couldn’t find anywhere on the market candle sculptures that represented modern Black culture, so she decided to make her own and reasoned what she was looking for, others are too.
Officially launched in 2023, the online shop has a variety of products, including home decor items, scented pillar and jar candles, but her signature designs are wax sculptures — small busts representing people of African descent.
“My thought was African-American culture ... the Black (and) brown culture and community has shown up in every single time space in history — appropriate to that time space. We’ve shown up in the Colonial era. We existed in the Roman era. So why are there not more representations? If I want to see, I don’t know, Harriet Tubman in a candle, why can’t I find that thing?” Gilliam told us. “We can actually have versions of ourselves from every historical time period and that’s what my art is.”
.jpg "Photo Jul 31 2024, 2 46 13 PM (1).jpg")
‘That really wasn’t what I was looking for’
A few years back during the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Gillam, like many of us, had a lot of time on her hands — time to think.
With a background in interior design, Gillam kept herself busy with decorating her apartment, happily surfing the internet for things to buy, and she decided what her plain empty mantel needed was a “nice decorative candle sculpture.” There were tons of candle options on the internet to purchase, pillars and wax statues, such as Greek or Roman gods, or even Michelangelo’s David or Venus.
All reasonable choices, but as she searched, there was nothing that quite captured her, she said.
“I don’t really want someone who doesn’t look like me,” Gillam said. “There’s got to be options out there of beautiful sculptural candles of brown and Black people.”
She did find some representation of Black art in the form of a candle sculpture.
“It was very, very tribal. I mean the rings on the neck, the nose rings, which is fine, if that’s the aesthetic that someone was going for,” she said. “There’s obviously a market for that, but that wasn’t really what I was looking for in my personal decor.”
Gillam decided to park the idea of buying a candle, for now.
Fast forward to 2023, Gilliam was feeling burnout and left a full-time job in real estate to search for other opportunities. But every time she found another job, it turned out to be worse than the previous. She didn’t have much saved up, but decided to just take a sabbatical.
“I can’t explain to anyone how I knew it was the right decision for me. I knew how long I had before I needed to get another job,” she said, which was two months. “I’m just going to figure it out and let God open doors, where he opens doors.”
That door opened. Sitting in her living room and staring at her empty mantel, still unadorned for nearly two years now, she again started looking for that perfect candle sculpture – and still did not find what she was looking for. Again, when she searched the internet, Gillam netted the same results from two years ago, including the tribal representation.
It seemed nothing new had come on the market, nothing that she felt represented her. It didn’t seem to exist.
“It just dawned on me that if it didn’t exist and someone was looking for it, that means other people might be looking for it, too,” she said.
Enter Omar, Queenie and Sasha
Gilliam says she has this toxic trait that if something doesn’t exist she can just fix it, or make her own, or make it happen.
Reality soon kicked in when she realized that while she may be a creative person, she is not really an artist. Still, she wanted to create a candle sculpture that represented a modern version of African American culture.
“How far back do you have to go to see us in our glory? We always want to be the kings and queens that we were in Africa,” she said. “You don’t have to go back that far for us to have a strong presence and to be changing the game for our own people.”
.jpg "Photo Jan 28 2025, 9 24 00 AM (1).jpg")
But that question “how” also entailed the ways to bring this idea into existence, which took a lot of research including, some 2,000 hours of YouTube videos to learn how to sculpt with clay. Gillam learned to craft generic miniature busts. And she did more research on what these busts could resemble in a way that represented her.
“Hey, if I’m a modern, sophisticated, educated woman, there should be representation of me in every field in the retail industry. And there wasn’t,” Gilliam said.
Gillam added that it wasn’t so much about recreating a specific person, though among her heroes are Kerry Washington, Michelle Obama and Keke Palmer.
“I was trying to create who they were in our culture,” she said. “They (are) modern, sophisticated, accomplished, professional driven people. What does that look like in what some would be considered as insignificant as a candle? For me, it was like drawing from the inspiration that I found from these women that are changing history, shaping history.”
Using images, Gillam designed the clay busts and then purchased silicone to create the candle molds and played around with different types of wax. Among the first prototypes were images of a man and two women, whom she dubbed Omar, Queenie and Sasha. Gillam makes all her own sculptures and designs.
Omar is a representation of a man from biblical times; Queenie was the name her paternal great-grandmother; and Sasha is both an inspiration from Michelle Obama’s daughter and Beyoncé from when she referred to herself as “Sasha Fierce.”
“Creating a line of sculptural candles that I feel really should already have been on the market ... I’m just happy that I could bring it to the market,” she said. “ ... setting it up for other people to do the same thing and for other black men and women to say, ‘hey, it’s okay. I never thought about a candle that way. I never thought that a candle would represent me,’ but why shouldn’t it.”
Bailiwick Studio
Instagram: @bailiwickcandle
Editor’s note: This feature originally appeared in The Charlotte Observer’s Kaleidoscope newsletter, as part of a series designed to highlight our BIPOC businesses. Subscribe for free to get stories like these and more delivered to your inbox.
This story was originally published February 25, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
