Clara happens to have been one of the first to join the creative community. She shares her workspace with six other artists specializing in all variety of materials—stone, ceramics, glass, and, of course, metal. Her space serves as working studio and a gallery space. She uses a portion of her welding gear to create intricate metal sculptures.

At 18 Clara left Paris to study fine arts—specifically photography—at Central Saint Martins in London. “I really wanted to leave Paris, live abroad, and be fully myself in a new place, completely free,” she says. In London she found a new passion, turning scrap metal into sculpture contemplating big themes—not quite “What is life?” but adjacent questions, like “What is time?” and “What is space?” Her sculptures transform metal, glass, and mirrors (the same materials that comprise a camera) into instruments and gadgets that measure, or at least reflect, these themes.

In her last year of school Clara met three artists who became close collaborators and friends. Together they moved to Lisbon to save money to move back to London—but after a few months Clara came to love Portugal. She developed a relationship with local Galeria Foco, and before returning to her hometown Paris spent time between Portugal and her father’s house in the Northwest countryside of France.

In Paris today Clara works with the young, nomadic Hors-Cadre Gallery. “It’s important to have that kind of support as an artist, especially when you do have to think about selling the work or getting funding to create a bigger installation that obviously you cannot self-fund,” she says. She notices the competition in Paris is higher, perhaps, than it was in Lisbon, just due to the sheer number of artists in the city. Being part of Poush helps—the project offers greater visibility as well as resources and support for their artistic development, production, and administration.

Clara says the best part of Poush is the collaboration between artists, the ability to hold conversation around their works, incorporate new techniques, and work together to push their practices further. As we have a friendly chat in her studio other artists and collectors pop in and out to say coucou and have a look around, her friends joke about the heat and the impending chill of winter (the studios are sparsely heated). When our conversation turns to her work, I ask how she describes her sculptures. “I love the word instruments—instruments that measure depth and aerospace. I think that’s what I like about sculpture is that as an object you have the possibility to turn it and have different angles, different points of perspective.” Lark Breen contributed to this article.

When did you know you wanted to be an artist?

I do not believe that one chooses to be an artist. It is something that happens over time, and in my case my mother gifted me a camera when I was very young and enrolled me in a silver photography class. That probably sparked my relationship to the image and taught me how magical it can be. To be able to depict the world and shape it as you want is a powerful feeling.

“Shadow Objects,” 2020, steel installation. Photo by Photo Documenta, Courtesy of Galeria Foco

How did you transition to working in sculpture?

I started working with photography and the notion of the image and how the world and the eye converse in it. The French word for image is also an anagram for magic. The transition into sculpture occurred with this study and reflection around the encounter with an object—in my case through the lens of a camera.

I began to experiment with space by printing or projecting images on different materials. Another work was about deconstructing the camera itself and using all its elements. I then created a sculpture, and through it you could see a projected image of a horizon line in the desert. This project piqued my interest in apparatuses that allow us to capture and measure the invisible—from telescopes to microscopes—and I started imagining devices of my own.

“My work comes from my fascination with scientific, mathematical, and philosophical theories. I believe that the role of the artist is to rethink realities.”

Did you learn to weld in art school?

At Central Saint Martins we had access to a vast range of workshops focused on different materials, but you have to choose; you go to the workshop, meet the technician, and you kind of have to fight a bit for what you want. It’s a very good thing because they’re preparing you for the future. You’re always going to have to fight for what you want.

I passed by the metal workshop every day and I was fascinated by the smells and sounds but a little bit scared. It smells of burning and blood and noise. It’s very intense. I was collecting unwanted metal pieces left outside, and one day I decided I needed to assemble these. I went inside and met a technician named David and wonderful artists as well. I made a point of going to the metal workshop every day, and I would always start with a little question that ended in a 30-minute conversation of how I can build something. It offered a great framework for learning, but you learn a lot alone, too. You have to just figure it out yourself sometimes because it gives you confidence.

“Orrery,” 2021, steel, stone. Photo by Photo Documenta, Courtesy of Galeria Foco

How would you define your style? Or how do you think your work fits into the art world?

My work comes from my fascination with scientific, mathematical, and philosophical theories. I believe that the role of the artist is to rethink realities and explore them in a new language. I am not necessarily concerned with how my work fits in the art world. I think more about its place in relation to our history, as in my work I collect all sorts of symbols and myths and give them new meaning—hopefully a poetic one.

What other artists and experiences inspire your work?

In 2017 I went to Naoshima and Teshima islands in Japan, and it was one of the most sublime experiences I have had. For me it transcended everything that art should be about; there were James Turrell, Walter De Maria, and Claude Monet all living alongside each other.

There are so many artists who inspire me: Hilma af Klint, with her exploration of the invisible and symbols, and Barbara Hepworth with her relationship to the material. I really like land artists because of their relationship with the landscape. They made this bold statement of working outside the gallery space in the ’70s, and the perception of art shifted completely. When I was studying, there was a moment…

They clicked with you.

Yes, it clicked, it did something. I love film, too, even though it’s very different from my practice. For example Andrei Tarkovsky creates such peculiar, almost palpable atmospheres. And in Stalker, the idea of a dystopian environment where the dreams of men can come true is daunting. I am very influenced by science-fiction, but some of those imagined worlds paint a dark, post-apocalyptic portrait of the future. With directors like Tarkovsky there is always some sort of hope in humanity, and this is essential. There are always going to be beautiful things and very difficult things in our world, so as an artist I hope to make people dream a little bit and go back to this inner child who is marveled by their surroundings.

“Indefinite Motion,” 2023, Stainless steel and treated steel. Photo by Marcio Vilela

What is special about your studio space?

I am lucky and happy to have a studio here at Poush, which I share with six other artists. It is very fulfilling to be in this community where we give each other a fresh eye on things and have passionate conversations. I think art today is becoming more and more collaborative, and it’s important to embrace that.

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A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 11 with the title “Metallic Rituals.” Subscribe today.

Steven, who founded DenHolm after working in masonry and attending school for fashion, and Lars, who also got his start in the fashion industry, have created a niche in the industry blurring the lines between stone furniture and sculpture. The founders and their team arrive around 6:15 in the morning every day for a planning meeting where they go through the projects they’re currently working on, monitoring progress from first sculpt to final approval from the client.

“The majority of the time we’re reacting to a client getting in contact with us because they like something we’ve already made,” Steven says. “Then that will be the beginning of the conversation.” DenHolm’s clients are primarily interior designers. If they’re after a new piece the studio will work off a mood board, eventually forming something entirely unique. If a client is after something very similar to an existing DenHolm piece the team will use that as a base, but because everything is done by hand Steven says they never make the exact same thing. “We actually can’t. We don’t have the capacity to make exactly the same thing. It’s always iterations—they’re always slightly different.”

Among its upcoming projects DenHolm has been asked to headline a gallery exhibition for this December’s Art Basel Miami Beach. As opposed to the usual client briefs, that project is a bit more about the conceptual. “We’re given a brief, which is pretty much ‘do something mental or do something brilliant,’ and then we put our heads together on that, and Steven does his magic,” Lars says.

The “heads together” making and experimentation is the team’s favorite part and perhaps even the key to Steven’s so-called magic. The continual iteration gives way to a sense of freeness felt within each piece, as though the works are stirring or reacting to a constantly changing environment.

This same spontaneity and desire for originality spurred DenHolm to build Gazzette—a digital platform described on its pages as “A Liberated Voice Free From PC Mercenaries & Absently Choreographed Content.” Deep diving and navigating the platform is strangely similar to exploring their sculptural pieces; the Gazzette has an unpredictable nature that feeds DenHolm’s exploration of the curious and the surprising. But while the studio’s physical works are typically made to brief, the Gazzette allows them to get deeper and wilder with their mindset around creativity. In it they explore interesting people doing everything from designing knitwear to tiling pools, and dive into their own process as well. “There’s a bit of a madness there. We’re showing that our processes aren’t really processes. They’re all over the place, like the format of the site,” Lars says.

As a design studio DenHolm purposefully stands on its own—bold in its decision to largely reject the mainstream design discourse, opting out of gallery shows and events within Melbourne’s creative community and choosing to pave its own way without hesitation. Speaking with Steven and Lars, the pair reiterates a commitment to embracing the imperfect to discover what it means to create.

What do you love, or hate, about making a sculpture?

Steven: With sculpture you can have something you really love from one view and then take three steps to the right, and it could be something you really don’t like. The conflict is that if you change that piece, more than likely it will influence the piece you love. Then it becomes a hierarchy of decision-making around what is possible. There’s a game that gets played.

Lars: Yeah, there’s a give and take. You’ve also got the utility of the piece in that equation—is it usable in that format, in that finish? On top of that, with any type of creative application, one thing we always ask is, “Do we want people not to like it?” That’s the other element. Make people a little bit uncomfortable. Make the piece more memorable because it’s not solved automatically. Give them something to think about, another angle to look at it.

With the more conceptual briefs, is there a moment when you realize that a piece is finished?

S: When it leaves.

Do you tinker until the end?

L: Yeah, absolutely. The last piece we just put out to London; we were literally tinkering while it was going in the box. I think when we’re working on more of a conceptual piece we get the cooperative element of everybody involved in the studio.

S: Yeah, exactly.

How does that relate to what you’re doing with Gazzette?

S: It’s funny. This is the first time the penny’s dropped a little bit. [Gazzette] is like a piece because there’ll be some functionality to it, it works in a certain way, but then there’s the way it’s laid out. Sometimes it’s not easy for the viewer to understand, but that allows the person to come back and see something new the next time, which I think should always be represented in a DenHolm piece. The idea of somebody walking around a piece and understanding it within one walk around would be a disaster.

“There’s a bit of a madness there. We’re showing that our processes aren’t really processes. They’re all over the place.”

L: You’re right. Each page of the Gazzette should have that to it. As people dip and dive out they get something new every time. I think that’s fun. It’s just the beginning; there’s so much more where it’s going, and its potential is fucking huge. And that’s fun as well.

What’s the main thing you’ve learned from your own work and creative process?

S: More than anything, the essence of it is backing yourself. For years and years it’s Sunday night and you start getting the fear because you’ve got to go back to work. Before you know it you decide not to sleep until one in the morning because you have to watch that TV series. But at the end of day it’s just because you don’t want Monday to come. I haven’t had that feeling for the past six years, and that’s the dream.

L: I had exactly the same thing when I was younger. It really hit me when I was doing my own [fashion] line and they asked me to create a small capsule collection for Topshop. They approached me with a stupid amount, like a design fee. I went into the Topshop offices and the elevator opened on all these tiny little cubicles of people, and from that point on in my career, particularly in terms of creativity, at times I sacrificed money. At times I felt guilty about not taking certain contracts, but I knew that’s where it was ending for me. Creativity, especially in terms of design, is often about relationships—with yourself and with other people as well.

L: It becomes like a relationship, and it’s there and it’s tangible.

S: It’s a good source of memories. It’s like a photo, but it’s captured like a little time capsule.

L: All the emotions and things come back to you. I have that with people I’ve worked with in the past. I look at collections… it’s not about the beauty of the garment. It’s like I can remember the late nights sitting around with close friends and having a curry and being stupid or whatever. Relationships in creativity are quite beautiful, as soppy as it sounds.

Do you have any advice for other creatives out there?

S: This is really easy: Just do. And that’s super complex. The thing is you can’t grow if you’re not moving. It’s impossible. That doesn’t mean making bad decisions constantly, but even bad decisions allow you to grow. Even if it’s going backward first to go forward. Stop looking at fucking Pinterest. Don’t be a copycat. If you’re copying you’re always going to have
to copy.

L: Don’t overthink. As soon as you start thinking about the cost of things, the moment you start hesitating like that or even worse, in my case, thinking “What is someone going to think of this?” you can get frozen by that. Just fucking play. Have fun. Don’t worry about measuring it.

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A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 11 with the title “Imperfection in Stone.” Subscribe today.

Suchi Reddy is the founder of Reddymade—an architecture, design, and public art practice based in New York—and has become known for her philosophy of “form follows feeling.” When we gathered for this conversation Suchi and Hannah immediately began to explore the commonalities in their journey. Their conversation is an enlightening exploration of creativity, perseverance, and the power of vision in shaping the world of art and architecture. –Chris Force

Chris: So how did the two of you meet?

Suchi: I had the honor of being selected to do a work at the Smithsonian, which was the centerpiece for a show called “FUTURES.” The curator in charge was Isolde Brielmaier, who it’s been my great honor to get to know and work with. She’s currently the deputy director at the New Museum in New York. Her assistant at the time was our lovely Hannah Traore. Hannah was instrumental in working with me very closely to bring this very complicated work, which we were doing in the midst of the pandemic, to fruition.

I was so impressed with Hannah from day one. She jumped in the middle of this project with so much grace. It was a complex idea with many moving parts that was trying to become physical at a time when we couldn’t make anything physical. We couldn’t see each other. We met on Zoom. As we got to know each other she told me her goal was to start her own gallery. I was incredibly impressed—to be thinking about that at such a young age, now 28, and in New York? New York will eat the weak. It’s just what happens here. It’s not that we mean to do it; it happens.

The fact that she was so young and passionate about making her mark in a world that’s as competitive and as difficult as the art world is, I was just so impressed. Then to see her mission—because her mission is really about amplifying Black and Brown voices and alternative ways of thinking about art and bringing those to the fore so they can be seen and understood in a way that made it not a strange experience for people. To remove this velvet rope that sometimes exists around work that’s from different places made by different people. I was incredibly excited. And of course, she made it happen. She opened an art gallery in the Lower East Side, and her first show was stunning. I had the honor of being the first person to buy an artwork from her first show.

What I’m really excited about, Hannah, is what drove you to do this. Tell me a little bit more.

Hannah: I just want to explain the story a little bit from my perspective, because obviously jumping into a new project, like you said, was so hard. One of the reasons I jumped in so easily was because of you, Suchi, and your team and how welcoming and kind and understanding you all were. You took the time to explain things to me, you made sure I was comfortable and knew what was going on. It was this seamless experience because of you guys. It was a really important project in my life, and I’ve taken that with me.

Something I’ve never told you about was something you said in a talk I came to. I think about it all the time because I think it’s the same with art. You were talking about how architecture completely changes mood. Maybe that sounds obvious to you because that’s your thing, but it really changed my perspective because something I had felt for so long was put into words. I have taken that forward with me. Thank you for that wisdom.

I started the gallery because I love the art world, and when you love something you want to make it better. I saw so many things that were missing and so many conversations that weren’t being had. Instead of complaining about it I felt like I should use the opportunity I had to do something about it. When you were saying I did this for my family, it is very true—the way I grew up, I’m half West African. I’m from Mali, and I grew up in a house with my two parents, my three siblings, and a wild amount of cousins and uncles.

S: I’m from India, so same story.

H: It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Community is this innate thing within me, and I think it is for a lot of immigrants. When I was building the gallery I wanted it to be for my people—to have my people feel comfortable in the space, because like you were saying, that iron curtain is real. It’s sad because galleries should be the most accessible art spaces. They’re free. But because of this iron curtain, this kind of superiority complex, people don’t feel comfortable.

It’s really important to me that people who look like me or people who can relate to the idea of otherness feel comfortable in the space. I want them to feel comfortable showing in the space, feel comfortable buying in the space, feel comfortable being in the space without buying anything or participating in that way at all. That’s how I’ve built the community I’ve built, which is maybe what I’m most proud of about the galleries—the community I’ve built around it. That includes my artists, my collectors, like you, Suchi, buying the first piece. I’ll never forget that. I’m so glad it was you and not anybody else. That meant the world to me.

S: This is why teaching has been an important part of my life for the last five years or so. When you tell me something I said years ago becomes a force in shaping your ethos, those are the things we leave behind.

What was exciting to me was that point of view you brought about in your first show. How are you carrying that forward?

H: I think art doesn’t exist on its own, but galleries like to make it seem like it does. They’re so hesitant to bring in anything, even education, into that space. Museums do a way better job of that. Actually, I have had no experience in galleries. I was a museum girl. So maybe that’s part of the reason as well, but I think about these things, also for me, because I have a brick-and-mortar space. I think to myself, “I want to bring everything I love into that space.” Obviously the main thing is art, but that also includes children.

“It’s really important to me that people who look like me or people who can relate to the idea of otherness feel comfortable in the space.”

I thought I was going to be a teacher until sophomore year of college when I took an art history class. My preschool report card said I wanted to be a teacher, a mom, and a Spice Girl [laughs]. Kids are super important to me. Education is super important to me. I was lucky enough to be able to do an exhibition with students from three schools in the neighborhood ages 3 years old to 15. All the money we made from sales was matched by the gallery and went back to the schools.

Fashion is also really important to me. We’ve done fashion collaborations, and we’re going to continue to do that. And food actually. I’m not sure if you know this about me, but I’m a real foodie. That also has to do with my family and community. I’m about to do a collaboration with a chef with my last name. He’s not related to me, though, Roze Traore. I think part of this comes from the fact that I am trying to bring everything I love into the space, everything I love interacts with art anyway.

S: It’s so exciting for me to hear. My practice includes architecture, art, interior design, art installation, the intersection of neuroscience, whatever it is. Everybody wants you to have a certain voice, and they want you to do the same thing 10 times so they know what to expect from you, so they can put you in a box. But life isn’t lived in a box, right?

These kinds of complicated problems that you and I face as immigrants or as Black and Brown people in a place where we have to carve a voice out for ourselves, are complex. Our problems don’t fit in any box. You need lots of different kinds of people to really be thinking about them.

This idea that art is a part of culture, and art is a part of feeling, and culture actually encompasses people of all ages, people of all kinds is really about community because that’s what it all comes down to in the end. That’s so fascinating to me. I love the example of the school kids’ show, but talk to me about what’s up right now—Quil Lemons from Philadelphia.

H: This is his first solo show at a gallery. He’s known for his commercial work, and a lot of galleries shy away from photographers who are also commercial photographers. I have a friend who’s a commercial photographer and a fine art photographer who says that even after all his success, he still is anxious and still gets shade because he also is in the commercial world.

He’s a good example because he is the cross section of art and fashion and the commercial world and still deserves this beautiful platform. The work is so powerful and strong, and so beautiful, and not commercial at all. If it was that would be OK, too. I had a glass blower in the back room for an installation. She said to me, “I would never usually be in a fine art gallery. I would be in a craft gallery.” The problem with a craft gallery is they don’t care about the conceptual grounding. Why is craft seen as a negative? Why can craft not be in a fine art gallery? It’s all these weird binaries and rules that don’t need to exist.

S: I see that in my world, too. If you do interior design it’s somehow less than architecture. I think that’s so crazy because that’s the first thing people react to and they touch. Architects often sort of close themselves in this jargon that makes what we do inaccessible to people. I think that’s just the wrong way to go about it. Our job should be to make people feel better. That’s our job, to uplift people.

To come back to this idea of fashion, coming to this country at the age of 18 from India, I knew nothing about fashion. I went through this phase of wearing all black all the time. But what I always really liked about fashion, which I find frustrating in architecture, is that it’s represented much better in photographs. Architecture is a three-dimensional thing. You need time and space and movement to really know what you’re looking at. Fashion has a kind of meta thing as well, which is there’s the object and then there’s the person who wears it, and then there’s the image of it, and then how it’s represented, how it makes it into the world. Whether it’s a commercial thing or an artistic thing, on both sides of that spectrum it’s a very interesting trajectory.

I like to bring the discussion of design back to the body because I think this is a democratic space that we all understand without our socioeconomic, political differences; we can all relate here as to how we feel about things. I build my world out of my body, right? The first layer of housing is my clothing. The second layer is maybe my immediate space.

Then it’s my home, then it’s my city, then it’s my country, then it’s the world, then it’s the planet. It’s this trajectory, but there’s a through line to that. I don’t see why any of those layers cannot be designed in fluidity to really understand everything together all at the same time. Each one of those layers has to affect the other one. When people look at things like interior design and fashion as frivolous, I find that to be a troubling trope.

I’ve loved seeing you, by the way, becoming a model and not afraid to say, “Oh, I’m a gallerist and therefore I cannot be known as something else,” but to be broadly proud of who you are and how you express yourself, that’s been amazing to see, at least for me online. How do you feel about that?

H: Day to day my creativity is most used in putting together an outfit, because I do that every day. I find it exciting. When people ask me what my style is, it’s so eclectic because it depends on my mood, but also the way I feel in my apartment. My best friend is studying to be an interior designer. I had my apartment a certain way and the couch a certain way. One day she was like, “We’re changing it.” She switched it around, and it just feels so much better in here. It really does affect the way you move throughout the world if you’re intentional, and I was really intentional about the way I did the architecture and interior design in the gallery. I put curves in, and I wanted it to feel cozy like a hug. I put warm lighting and warm white walls.

It’s interesting that you were saying you loved seeing me out in the world because that has been a struggle for me. I’ve been very insecure about showing that part of me because I think people think if you own a business you must be a serious person. You can’t be a party girl, or you can’t enjoy life. I’ve only been doing this for a year-and-a-half, so yeah I’m going to be really excited if Chanel invites me to a dinner. I’ve struggled because I worry people are going to think that’s what I do all day. But I think it’s more important to just be myself.

S: I think you’re amazing because you’re not letting anything hold you back in terms of how people expect you to be or how they expect you to behave. I think that’s very much in line with not just the ethos of the gallery but also the ethos of the artists you represent. The beautiful thing about being a bit more in public is that you can use that platform to talk about the things you really care about.

H: Someone told me they overheard someone saying that the reason I’ve been successful is because of my “tits and ass.” I hear things like that and it crushes me. I was very insecure about these things at the beginning. I think it’s important, especially for women, to prove we can do both, you know what I mean?

S: If someone says, “It’s all about your tits and ass,” there’s an intention there that’s not useful. That’s not productive. Not to that person or to anybody else in the world. If you say something horrible, you’re affecting the person next to you, and you’re going to affect yourself. Why shouldn’t you be able to show off who you are? Why is that something that is not allowed?

I do want to recognize for a moment the difficulty of being women in the world and doing this kind of thing. Just last night I was looking at an artwork by Doris Salcedo. She did this giant work called Shibboleth, which was an amazing, huge crack in the floor of the Tate Modern, and she lined it with stones from her native space, but she was talking about the ostracizing of immigrants and the way in which immigrants feel other—that you can make yourself visible as a crack in the ground, and you’re going to get backlash.

You are going to get feedback whether you like it or not. I think power is an important thing, to understand the power of your actions and to know your actions have the power to trigger something in somebody. That could be good, that could be bad, that could be a range of things, but the opportunity to affect change exists always within you and everything you do. You have to boldly go out into the world just as you do now and continue to do it.

The other thing I do want to appreciate is that you’re not afraid to express your vulnerability around this. That’s also a really important thing that certainly women in my generation couldn’t even say those kinds of things. There was a time when you would be even more dismissed, working in fields mostly male-driven.

I love my industry, so I really do crave the respect of the industry. What I’ve realized is I just have to be myself and follow my own vision.

H: I think it’s always so important to give credit where credit is due. I’m a young woman who owns a gallery in a very white male space. I couldn’t even probably have opened the gallery without people like you and Isolde paving the way before that, so I know the things I’m going through now, not that they’re not important, but they are miniscule compared to what was going on. A huge part of that I think is that I do have a community to turn to. I have mentors, which is so important, but I also have peers and other young Black women who are doing similar things who I can lean on.

S: One of the reasons why I’m so impressed by you is that I’m a late bloomer. Truly, for many years I didn’t stick my head out of my own practice. I didn’t even look at what anybody else in the world was doing. I just focused on doing my own work. To some degree I didn’t want it influenced by what other people were doing or thinking, so it was quite an insular practice. Then about 10 years ago I began to realize if nobody knew about what I was doing there wouldn’t be a way to expand it. If it can have impact, depending on the scale, now I say yes.

Also, as a person in business you have to accept something’s got to pay the bills and keep the lights on, then you can go and do the poetic things that don’t pay the bills, but keep the lights on for your soul.

C: How do you balance those two things?

S: It is a dance, to be honest. That’s where I’m really grateful I’m an architect because pretty much anything I do can have an impact on the lives of the people that it affects. Sometimes I think no matter what decision I make I’m changing the world. Making something out of nothing, something that didn’t exist before, is a very difficult task. To do that in whatever shape or form keeps me humble and happy. We all try to be profitable while we do that so we can do other things that follow our artistic voices, but it’s a dance, for sure.

“Qween Jean (She/Her), Costume Designer and Community Organizer, Brooklyn 2022,” as part of “Gods That Walk Among Us” exhibition by Camila Falquez. Courtesy of Hannah Traore Gallery

H: The respect of the industry is something I think about all the time. I’m the type of person, if I don’t like you or respect you, I don’t care what you think of me. But if I respect you and like you, I really am craving your respect. I love my industry, so I really do crave the respect of the industry. What I’ve realized is I just have to be myself and follow my own vision. I’ve had the gallery for a year-and-a-half. The artists I show are wonderful, but their price points aren’t high enough to keep my lights on. I need to find other ways, because even if a show sells really well, I’m not making that much money from it.

The back room right now is a sound and video installation, which is not sellable. I just lost tons of money on that. I lost money on the kids’ show. I did a charity show for an organization called Artistic Noise that helps youth who have been affected by the prison system. These things are very important to me and so what do I do? Honestly, brand partnerships. It is a tough dance because that trickles into me worrying I’m not getting respect because I’m doing these things, but I need those things to fuel the passion project.

S: You are light years ahead of me in this because we’re only just beginning to do that.

H: That’s where the money is.

S: We’re considering which brands we work with. It’s an intentional practice. You do have to be intentional about that and leverage your expertise in the right way.

hannahtraoregallery.com

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A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 11. Subscribe today.

Tatiana herself is well known and respected across the industry—she’s a force for good as she challenges the ideas of traditional architecture and what it means to take care of people. Her work includes a social housing prototype displayed at the 2015 Chicago Biennial that cost less than $8,000, a research center on the Sea of Cortez on Mazatlan, and, more recently, a master plan for the National Park La Huasteca, among countless other projects. Her work is part of the collection of the Centre d’Art Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Maika, originally from Monterrey and now living in Mexico City, is not long out of school but is already changing the way we think about design and function. She studied painting at the University of Monterrey and RISD and started her own studio, Panorammma. She now spends her days making furniture and design objects that are at once both magical and useful—from speakers that look like rocks to her Chainmail Chair, a creation she made with Renee Espinosa using a seat made from more than 2,000 hand-linked steel rings. It’s a modern take on an old metal craft and a conversation, she says, about grandeur, victory, violence, restraint, and bondage.
We recently sat down to facilitate a conversation with Tatiana and Maika as they talked about imagination, creation, and why to even create in the first place. –Laura Rote

Laura: What inspires you about one another’s work?

Maika: I was very lucky to come close to Tatiana’s work because my school has a new building she just finished. Every day I would go to class and see this huge project being built. The sheer magnitude of taking on a project like this for me is intimidating; I always work on a small scale. I’m very shy in that sense. Taking on these huge projects and even visiting her office last week, seeing her have a big team and still be able to be a creative is something I really admire.

Thinking about these buildings she made in Monterrey for my university, I think she really left aside her ego, which I think is difficult as an architect. You can tell she makes the context of the building a priority. Seeing these new buildings and taking a look at the old buildings, it’s almost seamless. It’s difficult to tell what is the new style and what is the old building.

Tatiana: Thank you Maika, very much. I saw your chair with the beautiful metal seat, and I was very, very impressed. Then I saw that you were the one Sixtysix was proposing me to have a conversation with and I was super excited because it was an opportunity to understand your work much more.

Right now you’re saying you are not brave. I think you’re very brave. I think the work you’re doing is super bold. You are experimenting with forms and materials, sticking to your desire and what you want to express. Not everybody does that—especially not in the beginning. To build your career you need a lot of agency to sell and to be able to sustain yourself. You have not surrendered your work to that because all the things I see are incredibly bold; you can tell they’re holding on to your principles. These have been designed with an incredible clarity and passion.

M: Thank you very much. That’s very nice coming from you. Because my background is not in design but more in art I really don’t know what I’m doing; my intention might come from an artistic background, but I like my work being utilitarian. That’s something I have found very liberating because I was frustrated before. I specialized in painting, and there was this point where it was just a painting, just making another work for the wall. It felt too distant from my everyday experience.

T: It clearly evolved into a beautiful manifestation. I think you don’t need to define it. Why define it?

I also tend to think more clearly now because I have always been immersed in the architectural scene, but I see myself as something very different. I’ve always been judged as if I should be doing architecture the way it’s defined. I don’t do that. Maybe it’s because I’m from a generation where the professions were so clearly designed. I think that’s not such a good way of working. The architect had these responsibilities and this way of doing things and these outcomes, and the designer had these, and the musician had these, and the producer had these, and everybody was expected to focus on their own specialty. I think I’m in that generation where we didn’t yet know where the boundaries were. We needed to explore and expand. I always felt much more outside of the definition.

The beauty of your position right now is you are in a moment that’s not needed to be defined. You started saying you didn’t know how to define it, but I don’t think you need to define what you’re doing. You’re doing beautiful work, and that’s what counts.

In my case, with the architecture I do, I picture it as a primary form of care. It really holds bodies—to allow them to exist on this planet. We cannot survive in the wilderness. I see it as a very basic human necessity and very relevant. I have a lot of responsibility on my shoulders because I do think of architecture as creating the possibility or impossibility for bodies to live in this world—and more than ever now. It’s not only about the fact that there is a protective shield. Now architecture has been used as a tool for capitalism, for power, for money, for discrimination, for exploitation. For me the definition of architecture is not about the form of its walls or the form of its spaces. It’s about the bodies and the stories developed in these worlds and spaces.

When I left school I thought I had learned nothing. I thought, “Everybody knows how to build things I don’t.” I realized 20 years later that it was not that I didn’t learn anything; it was that I didn’t have the correct tools or the learning environment in architecture to do what I thought I needed to do. I really like that you are challenging that.

“At first glance my objects might seem to come from a fantastical narrative, but they are utilitarian. They are meant to be used in real life but inform another storyline that’s not mine.”

M: I think architecture is like a Trojan horse for importing ideas in people’s lives. It’s a very big responsibility. In the case of a home it’s space where you live, which is not easily replaceable. In my case I usually make small objects that can move or change around. If something fails then it was just an experiment. I can get away with things. In your case it would be much harder experimenting with people.

T: Nevertheless we do.

M: You’re a testimony to experimentation in architecture. That’s really impressive. Thinking about where we find inspiration, I’m also thinking about my “pseudo-props.” I talk about my objects in this way because at first glance they might seem to come from a fantastical narrative, but they are utilitarian. They are meant to be used in real life but inform another storyline that’s not mine. I think your work does that as well. For example, the new aquarium in Mazatlan (opened in May 2023). It seems to speak to our possible futures. It was not an anthropocentric project, but it was really based around trying to expose and prioritize marine life. I think that’s very interesting.

T: I’m happy to hear you think of your objects with a fantastic story. The Mazatlan aquarium is exactly that. We had to invent a fantastical story of a building that got flooded when the sea rose to imagine the possibility of the space. I also think what you’re saying is interesting about creating fantasy to give life—to an object in your case, to a building in my case. Hopefully that can inform and allow anyone the possibility to create their own story with it or in it. I think that is very beautiful.

I’m also thinking of the identity part—how we are both Mexicans, living and working in Mexico City, and how this plays an important role in what we are talking about. We can be very creative here because of our context. We have not only the possibility; we have the necessity because we don’t have all of the resources. Also, the richness of the super-mixed culture we have is embedded in every aspect of our life, even physically in our city, which is built on layers. That informs us and gives us complex tools to create responses. Can you relate to that?

M: Yes, definitely. I think Mexico can be defined as a very complex system of syncretism; ideas come together that wouldn’t make sense anywhere else in the world.

As far as inspiration, I keep working to bring ideas together that don’t make sense until I give them a certain context. Mexico is in a very particular position in which you can still work with industrial materials on a small scale. You don’t have to make large orders.

That is very difficult in other parts of the world. I was living in Spain a year ago, but my idea was always to produce in Mexico. I left to do my master’s, and I kept the project going from abroad, which was really heartbreaking because I wasn’t here to witness the materiality of it all. But I looked into the processes of, for example, chrome plating that they had in Spain, and it was nearly impossible to make a single piece. Here in Mexico I can work on one-off pieces or limited editions with industrial tools that would be very difficult to do otherwise.

What I also really like about working with people here is that they are very willing to experiment; they get excited about trying new things. That’s part of our culture and the chaotic nature of the city—everything is always changing so fast, nothing is certain, and even the ground can move at any second, so I think people are willing to take risks to see where that takes us.

“A lack of resources allows creativity to exist.”

T: The fact that the ground is muddy and shaking all the time reminds me of the ever-changing nature of the environment and our bodies. I think it plays a very big role in our architecture and understanding certain aesthetics.

I also extract from what you said about your objects—that they can always move, that they’re not so static. One of the challenges of what we do is to understand how architecture is a very determined thing that is static, that holds an ever-changing process, which is life, which is everything, the environment, and our bodies. As living organisms we change by the minute, and the architecture is always there. How can the architecture be more sensitive to that?

A lack of resources allows creativity to exist. Every day you have to invent the possibilities because there are very few resources. How you compose them, transform them, and reuse them is embedded in our culture. On the other hand, a lack of legislation allows us to be very creative. In Europe or the US you have all these legislative rules, liabilities, and codes that dictate everything, and that’s how life is defined. We do have them, but nobody enforces them, and we don’t have them to that extent. In a way it’s a problem, and you have to deal with the problem that causes. But it’s also a platform for creativity because you don’t have to design according to a code that says design needs to be one meter-and-a-half from bed to wall. In our case there’s not the pressure of “How will the body in the space be cared for?” You don’t have to worry about a lawsuit or fine because you didn’t comply with the rules. I think that also promotes the design culture in which we live in.

M: In Mexico that freedom also causes a lot of problems.

I would also like to know more about your sustainable process.

T: I have a problem with the word “sustainable” because I think it has been misused. If we are really honest, nothing we do is sustainable. We don’t live in a sustainable system. There’s no possibility of achieving sustainability. The system we live in is determined to exploit and to accumulate capital. Nothing can be sustainable if we exist in this system. How can we do things that are less impactful, with less exploitation of people or resources? I think about how to transform this into a system of care.

When you speak about sustainability, I hope you speak about care because you need to be caring and responsible for the resources you are using and for the people involved to make less harm possible. If we transform our system of production into a system of care we would be much more sustainable.

If I think architecture provides a basic form of care, and I design spaces to hold bodies, it’s very different than thinking of architecture as a beautiful form. That’s how people have normally thought of architecture. I think there is a very deep necessity to challenge things in a more honest way.

M: The idea of care is very important. It’s why I transitioned into working with utilitarian objects as my medium because there is an interaction. For example, my Soft Jug collection, which is a series of little jugs that look almost like human organs or that are glued in some way. The interaction I expect between the user and these objects is more intimate than the interactions you would have with a normal cup. It displaces your daily routine. My intention is that it makes you take care of your objects more in general, almost personifying them.

T: It’s like what Elisa Iturbe in her essay “Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity” says. We are immersed in this society of production where the form in which we inhabit is already designed and completely surrendered to the use of carbon extraction, carbon exploitation, and carbon use. We’re never going to arrive at carbon zero or whatever form if we don’t change the form.

If we live in this society that has surrendered to production, which depends on capital extraction, we are never going to become a caring society. You can make a building carbon zero, but it’s not carbon zero if it’s in the middle of nowhere. Yes, thank you for making the building with less extractive materials, but it really doesn’t change anything. How can you use those materials in a much more profound way so it creates platforms of change? Instead of a small contribution—using recycled materials—how can you make something that uses the same resources and create a much deeper contribution?

I was asked to give a lecture on International Women’s Day where only women architects would present their work. I was to give a keynote, and they asked me to present my work. I said, “Only my work? It’s International Women’s Day. It should be a little bit more reflective.”

I wanted to understand what my role was as a woman architect, not just present my work. I wanted to talk about the impact of my work and opening paths for women in architecture. When I did the lecture I realized my work had done nothing to open paths for women in architecture; I had not profoundly impacted anything. The fact that I’m a woman doesn’t change anything. I’m there in the same power structure as men, doing exactly the same things in the same patriarchal system. For me to be there was to oppress other women and other disenfranchised people. So I declared myself guilty of being part of the system and tried to understand how to create a real impact. It’s the same thing as saying, “I’m doing a building using wood from the forest next door and not using any material from 10 kilometers away, blah, blah, blah.” I understand that if I speak and people see I’m a woman, there are more women seeing me who think, “I can do that.” But that doesn’t profoundly make a change. How can we take responsibility and really create platforms for change in deeper ways? That would be much more sustainable.

“When you speak about sustainability, I hope you speak about care.”

M: Claiming to be sustainable when creating things is maybe like being blind. For example, I’m trying to work with this material that is a residue from the chemical industry; it’s like glass or obsidian, almost chemically identical and physically as well. But if I’m going to make these objects and ship them halfway around the world, that completely nullifies my intention. It is veering toward a better way of making things than I otherwise would have done. If I were to use real obsidian carved from a mountain that would make matters worse, but it’s not like I am saving anything. I’m still impacting the planet negatively.

What do you say about the exploitation of people? This is very particular to Mexico as well. It is an opportunity for some. I have the ability to experiment unfortunately because other people have to earn a living, and they are willing to do whatever they have to do to earn money. That is not the case in other countries. That is why so many people are coming to Mexico to produce because they find cheap labor here—very good labor and craftspeople.

T: I think that it’s crazy. The whole world needs a country like Mexico with cheap wages with few laws in order to exist because that’s how they’re able to get their life everywhere else.

It’s really interesting to think in this way—to really think that we are going to be extracting, we’re going to be using labor that is discriminating, exploiting, and excruciating for people and no matter how we try not to, there’s no way because we live in this system. Everything we consume has a problem.

I heard the other day someone saying, “I feel super guilty.” The way to overcome that guilt is to first know that this is systemic guilt. It’s not one person; it’s the system that is guilty. The second thing is not to eliminate your capacity to tackle it but to give you agency—not to be overwhelmed by this guilt but to give you agency to work. Don’t give up working but think about how to create a platform for other possibilities. For me that is where the deep issues and the deep possibilities of talking about a different thing come.

M: I think you are in some ways changing the system. For example, I saw mostly women working in your office, and that’s something I strive to do as well.

T: Why don’t you tell us about your Singing Stone speaker?

M: Ah, yeah, I have the mold right here. That speaker came from my idea of pseudo props. There is a text (Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Descriptions) that talks about a mountain made of gold as a possibility in an imaginary world. My role at the moment is making possible imaginaries real. It was like thinking about that golden mountain as a fictional object coming to life and also thinking about the practice of sculpture.

When I used to sculpt with stone in La Huasteca one thing that was very important was listening to the stone as you sculpt to hear where it is hollow. You have a conversation with the material. Building around that concept and making a sound speaker is an allusion to these Bose speakers for your gardens. It looks like a rock, but it’s cast in bronze, which again speaks to the tradition of sculpture.

And it’s hollow so you can cover it. That was a fun project I did with a friend who has a speaker brand. I’m also excited to do more small pieces with lodestone, which is a magnetic rock, and make a series of clocks. We’ll see how it goes.

T: I love it. For me it is very different. Since I work with stories it’s not about the thing in which the building is done; it’s what the building does. Every story or every building has a different consideration and configuration. I really am always very amazed to relate to these materialities in a different way, and I love this from your work.

“The uncanny nature in my work is a reflection of a yearning to decipher my experience as a patient.”

M: I love experimenting with materials and finding new things to work with, but I do relate a lot to clinical materials because they contextualize my work. The uncanny nature in my work is a reflection of a yearning to decipher my experience as a patient. I had cancer a few years ago, and a lot of my work follows this personal story, but others spin off.

For example, I have here a Nitinol wire used to open your veins or arteries. It is a clinical material, but I want to use it to replace an electrical motor because it’s like a memory wire. If you twist it in a certain way and heat it a lot it will retain its mother form; you can reshape it, and if you heat it a bit it will bounce back into that shape. It has energy I want to use in replacement of a very simple motor that opens and closes a small box. Medical materials are very innovative.

T: Technology in many ways can be so many other things. I’m really happy to hear you’re working directly with that.

M: I also wanted to ask you, Tatiana. Do you have a creative routine?

T: I don’t. I have a crazy life [laughs]. Absolutely crazy and ever-changing with a lot of issues and things to solve every day, so I don’t have a creative routine.

I mean, there is a process in the office in the production of projects that normally are altered by creative moments—either by the team, by an external input, or by me—that come in waves.

For me it’s never routine because my life isn’t routine. I manage a very strict routine of the everyday life of my girls, but even that’s becoming looser because one day I’m in New York and the next day I could be in Iceland and the next day I’m back in Mexico, whereas my girls have a very structured “Monday to Friday, this happens every week” routine. In terms of the way we work in the office, there is a fixed day of reviewing projects—Tuesdays—but I’m not there the majority of the time. When I’m there then we have these meetings and everything can change, or maybe nothing changes. Do you have a routine?

M: I also go along with whatever needs to be done. Every week I go running in the forest. I’ll take a notebook and organize my week during that time. Some ideas I might sketch or something might come to mind at that moment, but it’s more like ideas that are in the back of my mind I carry within my day, and sometimes I might connect it with something and say, “OK now’s the moment to start this piece,” or “This makes sense with this material.”

T: I go to run, too. I cannot exercise in a gym or classes or whatever because I don’t have a routine. I always take my running shoes, but what I do is I try to listen to things I’m curious about. Sometimes ideas come and I write them in my phone. I might take a notebook now that you gave me this idea.

M: How old are your girls?

T: I have five kids; the oldest ones are now more helpful than before [laughs]. 24, 21, 19, 12, and 9 turning 10 tomorrow. I have to go for the birthday cake and take it to the school now. It’s a complicated life to manage [laughs]. It’s anything but boring.

panorammma.com

tatianabilbao.com

A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 11. Subscribe today.

“As a young artist every step is nerve-racking and exciting at the same time,” she says.

Perhaps the biggest break in YehRim’s career happened recently, when mega designer Kelly Wearstler found her work on Instagram. Kelly has designed for everyone from Gwen Stefani to Art Basel and is now a household name across books, décor, furniture, lighting, and more. Their collaboration began when YehRim was asked to design a terra-cotta collection exclusively for Kelly Wearstler Gallery. The final result shows off the unique qualities of terra-cotta stone in a series of sculpturesque table and wall art designs.

We recently sat down with the artists on a video call to chat across time zones about collaboration, inspiration, and how family has influenced their art. The work of YehRim’s father, artist Kang Hyo Lee, fills the shelves behind her as we talk. —Laura Rote

Kelly: Since you’re home, tell me what you were like as a kid growing up around art.

YehRim: Clay was part of my everyday life growing up. My mother is a ceramic artist, too. My parents would be working in the studio while I was running around, but I was too young to understand what they were doing.

K: Your father’s work is really beautiful. Does he work primarily with neutral colors?

Y: This is onggi, which is a Korean traditional jar. He’s really focused on the traditional Korean aesthetic, like mono colors on the pot base. My work reinterprets his in a way.

K: That’s amazing. You’re carrying on the legacy. How did you get started? How did you end up in the States?

Y: After undergrad in Korea I studied at California State University, Long Beach. I was there a year to prepare my portfolio. I found my voice in California. The professor there was really helpful because I was a little confused, having this tradition and this amazing history, but he encouraged me to explore my own ideas and aesthetics. Then I got my MFA in ceramics in upstate New York.

K: When did you move to Joshua Tree? How was that transition?

Y: Between grad school and Joshua Tree I did a lot of residencies. I was a visiting artist at the University of Georgia in the ceramics department (2017 to 2018), the University of the Arts (2018 to 2019), and the Clay Studio in Philadelphia (2018 to 2020). I went to Archie Bray in Montana (a foundation for the ceramic arts just outside of Helena). I felt like my work fit more in California, so I came back to California.

K: Do you love living in Joshua Tree?

Y: I’m still adjusting [laughs]. This is my first summer here. We had a really wonderful winter; it was beautiful. Now it’s so hot.

K: It’s so hot! But you guys have a really long, mild winter, which is nice. And there is so much inspiration, so much imperfection there, and of course the landscape. I see how that can be really inspiring to your work.

Y: We’ll have been here for a year in October. I live with my husband. He’s a poet. His main job is teaching, and his university is based online so he can work remotely.

K: You guys are both like poets because you’re a ceramic poet.

Y: Right, clay’s my language, and he’s working with words.

K: When I discovered you on Instagram I was so attracted to your work; we bought an existing piece of yours for a residential project. I just love the silhouette, and all the pieces are truly unique. You have these really beautiful glazes, but there’s also this beautiful textured quality to the work. You have these works of art and then small tables, and I know you’re experimenting with different things; what are some of your favorite types of pieces to work on? Are you working with another color story and technique?

Y: First, thank you for finding me. As an artist I’m really honored to be found by an amazing person like you.

But yes, today I’m more interested in functional pieces, like what we are working on together—what you chose—because my work was developing differently depending on where I was located. My work was installation-based when I first came to the US. I did more contemporary fine art I carried all my material with me and traveled the United States to do exhibitions. I’ve lived in the US 10 years and now, so I’m thinking more about stability and space in my home.

It was really good timing when we started working together because I was thinking about function a lot. I was starting to be interested in terra-cotta and silver glaze. Your idea of making drink tables opened my eyes more toward function and use. Right now I’m very interested in ceramic furniture and sculptural vessels.

K: When we purchased the piece for our client and then commissioned you for the gallery I remember we were shooting your pieces and putting them together and they looked so beautiful. Somebody can use these pieces in repetition because they’re all different; they all have their own individual voice and spirit, but they also work so beautifully together. You could put three tables together, and it really looks amazing, instead of having just one coffee table. It’s a little more interesting because it helps break the scale.

I’d love to work with you on a really great statement chair, something that could be at the entry of a house, or some sort of bench. A lot of our clients love things that are functional.

“I always like to develop in opposite materials, for example, porcelain or terra-cotta. I love the color contrast.”

Y: That’s really good to hear because you see so many furniture pieces working with so many different spaces. You have that insight. It’s always helpful to talk with someone who has that great experience.

K: We get a lot of data from our clients because we present so many different things to them. A lot of clients, even though they have very individual tastes, like a lot of the same things. It’s things that are really unique, not too specific. People love things that have a story, and you have such an amazing story with both your mom and dad as ceramic artists. It really is special.

Y: Thinking about what inspires me, when I see your work I see a lot of dimensions—the color layering, texture layering, pattern layering. I’ve always been interested in that, and thinking about the layers of myself was how I found my voice when I moved to the US.

K: So many different artists and creatives really get fuel from their environment and how they grew up. It’s really interesting to see where YehRim is now, her trajectory and how she was surrounded by ceramics at a young age. When I was young, like 5 years old, I can remember my mom dragging me to flea markets and auctions. At a very young age, you’re not aware of it, but you’re really educating your eye. You’re developing your story kind of unknowingly, and it’s really interesting. You have that story as well.

In terms of some of your new designs, YehRim, I know you’re working on some vessels similar to the tables. Are you looking at working with other types of ceramic or different glazes?

Y: I always like to develop in opposite materials, for example, porcelain or terra-cotta. I love the color contrast.

K: I love collaborating and working with different artists for the gallery and also working with artists to do things maybe they haven’t done before. I’m really excited about doing this chair or some sort of bench. I know there are limitations with scale, but even if there’s a series of three small benches that can come together to create one; I think that’s the beauty of when we assembled those tables. It wasn’t one; it was three coming together. I love your use of repetition. It’s really nice.

Y: I can’t wait to try the benches. That sounds really amazing.

K: We’re also working on a hotel project in Lake Tahoe. We’re assembling a great group of artists to work on the project, and we really want to commission you to do a piece there. I’m really excited to continue to work with you and develop these really amazing pieces.

Y: I can’t wait. That would be a great experience for me. It’s like we get to brainstorm together.

K: What is a dream project you think about working on? I get asked that question a lot, so it’s nice to be on the other side [laughs].

Y: My dream is to fill a room with my work—a table, bench, sculptural vessel—to create an interesting room in a public place. That would be exciting. I mean, dreams come true because my work is in an important place through your project. That’s a good start to my dream but having more of my work in one space would be amazing. My house is kind of like that.

yehrimlee.com

kellywearstler.com

A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 11. Subscribe today.

Really, sitting on her sofa at home in London and examining Masterpieces of Erotic Photography isn’t too out of the ordinary. Frances gravitates toward books—from erotic masterpieces to artist monographs to vintage car compilations—for inspiration for her work. She searches the pages for something with complexity that triggers emotion in her, something into which she can infuse her layered aesthetic of beauty and darkness and around which she can build a new world of meaning.

Trained in graphic design, Frances is a designer and artist, swapping her focus mainly between art direction and painting. She likes the variation in projects, but the balance between the two took some time to find, as she started her creative career in a commercial setting. It didn’t last, as Frances found the world of design for branding and marketing off-putting.

“The idea of creating desire and manipulating desire to sell things, things at the time I didn’t fully believe in or couldn’t buy myself, didn’t really sit well with me,” Frances says. Beginning to paint and working to satisfy her own creative impulses was in many ways a reaction to working commercially. “I wanted to produce something from my own point of view and create a world around that,” Frances says.

As she looked around for something worth talking about, she happened upon an old car book full of bright red racecars zooming through the streets of Monaco, covered in sponsor logos. Steeped in wealth and tradition, Ferrari’s Formula 1 team is practically synonymous with the color red and, at least historically, Marlboro cigarettes as a major sponsor—and its fans are notoriously ardent. The rendezvous of a moneyed institution, proximity to death for sport, and passionate audiences under the umbrella of an iconic, fiery red struck Frances. She began working on the project she would title “How to Sell Death to the Living.”

“I guess I like cars, but it’s not something I painted out of a passion for driving,” Frances says. “It was a visual work that compelled me, the idea of danger and speed and all of this super intense graphic imagery.” In stripped back sculptures of Marlboro cigarette packets and self-portraits of herself behind the wheel of a race car and decked out in a racing red fire suit and crash helmet, Frances creates a dialogue between things irresistible and harmful—and things that are both at once.

These themes arise again and again in Frances’ work. “At first you’re drawn to it, but then it’s not just purely aesthetic; there’s something else underneath,” Frances says. “Someone once described me as ‘darkness with a sweet tooth’ which has always stayed with me.”

In a painting inspired by the common depiction of Saint Sebastian, saint of athletes and archery, tied to a tree and shot by arrows, she paints her own body in bluish moonlight and plays with self-destruction using real, three-dimensional arrows to stab her two-dimensional body. “I think I may have had some issues at the time, I don’t know,” Frances laughs. “But I like this idea of self-destruction, and the intersection between masculinity and femininity, disrupting that a little bit as well.”

I ask if she remembers a particular moment in early life when she realized this kind of work was what she wanted to do. “One thing about me is I have quite a terrible memory,” she laughs, but tells me she’s always been artistic, always felt comfortable with a brush in hand.

Frances’ background in graphic design gives her a structured approach to painting: She sees something she likes, she researches it extensively, and then she plans out exactly how she wants it to look on the canvas. But she notes that she sometimes wishes she had more freedom to her approach, jealous of the skillful, gestural style of artists like Francis Bacon. “He paints in a way that’s just so direct and impulsive, like you can see every movement. I’m always in awe of his portraits,” Frances says. “Maybe there’s a bit of envy to it because I always want to know how something’s going to look before I paint it, and it’s in my mind quite mapped out.”

For Frances painting is about looking within herself to identify emotion and reactions, things with deeper meaning and intrigue. Flipping through the pages of a book at home, viewing dance performances or exhibitions with friends in town, or, in the case of Saint Sebastian, browsing a gallery in Rome, Frances keeps herself open to new experiences that strike a chord to bring home to her working dining table in her flat’s sunny living room nook.

The table is covered in paints and supplies—at least she says it usually is, gesturing to a surface that is currently fully cleared—waiting for her next burst of inspiration to bring her to a seat. Working from home allows her to sit down at the dining table—where she never actually dines—whenever she feels like it. She says not having a dedicated space or time to paint relieves her of a certain pressure. “I have an idea and I just go and do it.”

Behind her on the sofa, I catch a movement. Frances is dog sitting for a friend who’s in New York right now. The dog, Gino, adjusts, circling a few times before laying back down on the sofa, clearly at peace in Frances’ space. Unlike her work, layered with darker meanings and infused with color, her home has a more light, minimalist feel. “I can be quite chaotic as a person, so I like things to be a bit ordered and clean and minimal so you don’t see too much chaos. Otherwise you’d go crazy.”

But, like her work, the objects in her space go beyond what you can see. Frances used to flip antiques and secondhand furniture as a sort of side project; the table where she works and its chairs were all pieces she purchased and ended up liking for her own space. The marble coffee table is another favorite she couldn’t give up. It’s true that they add up to a rather sleek and straightforward sum, but each piece has something a bit unique, a hint of character and history.

Then there is the work itself, lining her shelves and hanging on the walls. Alongside the Marlboro sculptures and reinterpreted Saint Sebastian are several small, hyperreal paintings of everyday objects. Frances is in the middle of a new project, a series of trompe-l’œil works depicting objects like tape emblazoned with “FRAGILE,” running vertically down a canvas as if laid on top of it.

The trompe-l’œil paintings are a collection in progress, one she is looking forward to expanding with other, similarly charged objects. “I want to find more objects that maybe I can associate a different meaning to or something,” Frances says, reiterating the layers of visual interest and associated meanings in her work. “There’s a little element of it being personal, to kind of inject that into the work.”

franceswilks.com

A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 11 with the title “Darkness with a Sweet Tooth.” Subscribe today.

Somehow she found it. By that November she was moved in. Two years later I stopped by for a visit. Her son, who is now walking, bubbly, and curious, is very interested in my camera gear. As I set my tripod up he runs away, returning a moment later with a book about boats he insists I read to him. I do my best (the book was in French).

If your goal is to create a home that is both welcoming and casual, a well-rested, bright-eyed, giggling toddler will do the trick. Your décor can help, too. Sabina’s home, along with her fashion style, is what I would clumsily refer to as “effortlessly cool,” a look with a point of view but without pretension, a style that she and many other Parisian women have mastered.

Sabina designed this travertine console table with Talka Decor. “I specifically thought of this piece to lay some of my favorite objects on it—such as the little olive tree sculpture that was a wedding gift.”

As we talk she’s in a black swim top that reads both formal and casual at the same time. Her living room, with a grand stone fireplace surrounded by bookcases, is toned down by her son’s playpen, which is proudly arranged in the center of the living room and stuffed full of toys.

Before Sabina’s career as a fashion influencer, model, and business owner she briefly studied law in Strasbourg. Realizing that wasn’t for her, she moved to Paris to earn a master’s in journalism. “I did several magazine internships and that led to a full-time position at L’Officiel as a research director,” she says as we chat at her dining room table.

Sabina always had an interest in writing and photography; she started a blog in her teens. “It was more of a lifestyle thing, but it picked up really well. I was sharing my photography, music, books, stuff like that. I think girls were interested in my fashion sense. I was always a bit of a geek.”

After getting some real-world media experience Sabina decided to set out on her own. “I thought, ‘Why not just try to work for myself and make more money?’ I would have more freedom and make a better living. That was in 2017. I still make a lot of work and images for brands. It’s something I really enjoy, not just as a model and influencer.”

She began making content for the fashion industry and attracting a large audience in the US. She speaks and writes in English on Instagram and TikTok, but she also appeals to an American reader in general. “It’s a market I understand and love.”

Sabina defines her style as “urban, feminine, vintage, and sexy” that’s developed over the years in part by her love of research. “I’m a mega fashion collector,” she says as she pulls back a floor to ceiling curtain that enshrouds just one of her impressive closets. “I’ve always been interested in the fashion industry and collecting vintage pieces, even when I was a teenager with no money. Same with analog cameras. That’s a big part of my style. I really like to mix things, to have a personal touch.”

Her interest in both assembling and defining her own looks eventually led to creating her own fashion label, Pujka Paris. “It allows me to be creative with the fashion and with the images.”

Starting the label, which uses a mix of her skillsets in fashion, branding, media, and entrepreneurship, has not been without its challenges. “We have budget limitations, and investing your own money is scary. But it has given me more strengths, more intellectual power and confidence. It’s given me perspective on failures, too. They are just learning curves.”

A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 11 with the title “Sabina Socol.” Subscribe today.

Dressed in a simple but impeccably tailored white tee and flared jeans paired with red chunky sandals, the Chinese-raised, Swiss-educated, Montreal-based designer is deliberating with her assistant when I walk in. I find Ying sitting at her desk, surrounded by a large assortment of design books. She smiles as she motions for me to come in.

In the adjacent workspace, design students from the city’s French and English universities are quietly collaborating, trying to work around a variety of textile and technological challenges involving Ying’s new creative work. One student meticulously irons a piece of fabric while another pins it on a mannequin torso. One assistant taps away on her laptop, creating code that controls an assembly of wires and computer-programmed electronic components that make what looks like a kaleidoscope of broken glass come to life.

As a full-time professor at the French-language University of Quebec’s École supérieure de mode based in downtown Montreal, Ying begins most of her days in the university’s studio. “I’m a teacher, first and foremost,” she tells me. “I spend most of my time here.”

Ying usually arrives around 9am to meet with her assistants, review the plan for the day, and supervise the creation of assigned projects. “A lot of my work involves the technical and technological aspects of the designs, but I also handle most of the administrative work involved in getting some of these exhibitions off the ground,” she says. “The day goes by in a flash.”

Thanks to her diplomat parent, the designer spent her childhood between Switzerland and China. Last time Sixtysix spoke with Ying Gao, she recalled her first glimpse of the elegance and infinitudes of fashion at an Yves Saint Laurent exhibit in Beijing. The experience inspired her to study fashion at Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva, Switzerland before coming to Montreal at age 20 to complete her MA in interactive multimedia. Now, with two decades as a professor at the university under her belt, she says she’s more of a Montrealer than anything else.

Ying spends most of her days teaching and mentoring design students, but her creative work doesn’t appear to have suffered. Her designs have been featured in six solo exhibitions and more than 100 exhibitions around the world.

Despite her success Ying is soft-spoken, unassuming, and often meanders away from our topic to excitedly share her love for Greece (she recently visited the island of Hydra) or laugh as she confides her tendency to eat the same thing over and over again.

While she admits a fondness for routine, she’s known for her highly experimental and interactive garments inspired by the digital world. Her designs move and respond to various stimuli like virtual clothing. They’re like science fiction both in appearance and reaction.

For “Flowing Water, Standing Time” Ying created a pair of robotic dresses that react to their environment by rippling, twisting, expanding, and contracting as if they’re living entities. She’s also used technology to create dresses that respond to colors in the environment or when someone stares at them. For her “Walking City” collection, Ying incorporated concealed pneumatic pumps and sensors sewn directly on nylon and cotton so clothes appeared to breathe when their origami-style folds filled with air.

Another project, “Possible Tomorrows,” features interactive clothing embedded with fingerprint recognition technology that acknowledges only strangers. The clothes only react and move when touched by someone whose fingerprints are not recognized by the scanning technology.

Design students quietly collaborate in Ying Gao’s workspace. Photo by Guillaume Simoneau

And in her most recent collection, “In Camera,” two interactive garments detect the lenses of cameras and shift in response. The clothing offers an exploration of perception, the coexistence of public and private. The collection “does not want to be photographed,” yet it requires the gaze of the photographer to realize its dimensionality.

“As a fashion designer, images are of course important to my work, yet they also tend to flatten everything and to become unfaithful, because they are easily and readily manipulated. To animate a garment is to contradict its instrumental status as passive prosthesis. The idea is to give voice to clothing objects, to emancipate them, to free them from a passivity they have not chosen.”

Combining fashion design, product design, and media design, Ying uses materials like silicone, glass, plastic, and even artificial skin to create her conceptual art. She wants to fashion something tangible from the intangible. She wants clothes to be seen as fictional design and not merely as garments used to cover up our bodies.

Is art part of your family’s background?
No. My parents are intellectuals. They’re much more interested in literature and politics than art. I’m not even that interested in art. It’s design that really captivates me. The object interests me. It’s why I have a hard time with contemporary art. When it’s too conceptual I lose interest. I’m attracted to the object, the material used, and how I can use it.

Was there one moment when you knew design and art were going to be part of your future?
Yes, a very specific moment. I was around 8 years old, and my mother took me to see an Yves Saint Laurent exhibition at the Peking Fine Arts Gallery. Living in communist China, everyone was dressed in gray and blue. I actually loved the uniformity of it all. There’s something very reassuring and even relaxing for the eyes about all that sameness. But when I arrived at the exhibition I was struck by the richness of both color and materials. It was very different from what I saw on a daily basis. I didn’t necessarily find it beautiful; I found it different. That’s what mostly attracted me to it. The connection between fashion and creating something different was instant for me. I concluded that by being a designer I, too, could create something different. After the exhibition my mother says I started designing. I haven’t done anything else since.

What most inspires your work?
Strangely enough, literature. Most of the time I’ll read something, and it will inspire me. It could be a unique medical case or a compilation of essays. Flowing Water, Standing Time was inspired by neurologist Oliver Sacks’ novel, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In it 49-year-old Jimmie believes he has been 19 for decades. When faced with a mirror he’s shocked by his aged appearance but reverts to being 19 when not viewing his reflection. He, like the garments in this piece, alternates between states in reaction to the spectator. I created robotic clothing that reacts to what they see.

I’m inspired by the immaterial. I think I’m attracted by everything that is intangible. Another book I found inspiring was Esthétique de la disparition (The aesthetics of disappearance) by Paul Virilio. In it the author questions unconscious perceptions about the authenticity of images and the manipulations they’re often subject to. Anything that allows room for imagination compels me. I’m rarely inspired by concrete objects like a painting. It’s too visual. I need the freedom of interpreting something for myself. I like taking something immaterial and creating something material.

Your work, which you refer to as “design fiction,” is very experimental. Why?
Since I’m such a creature of habit in my daily routine, I like to experiment at work. People who have a lot of routine at work may prefer to try something different outside of work. I think every person has their own way of experimenting in life. My way of doing it is by speculative designing and often posing the question, “And if?” And if the material was different? And if I had made this differently, what would the end result be?

What is a typical day as a designer for you?
My daily work essentially starts the night before. I dream of designing. It’s something I should work on because it’s not relaxing. In the middle of the night I’ll think of the material we’re using on a specific project and how to make it better. I’m constantly working—while walking, while doing other things. It’s stimulating, but I have a hard time disconnecting.

I usually start my day at the university, meeting with my assistants who are mostly bachelor’s and master’s students, to plan our day. Don’t forget that my real job is as a university professor. I handle academic files that have nothing to do with my creative work but are essential to me.

What do you most hope to teach your students?
Difference. Create something different. It’s very easy to be comforted by routine; it’s reassuring. I understand that because I’m a real creature of habit in my day-to-day life. At the end of my day I always take a long walk in my neighborhood park, and that rarely changes. But when it comes to work I prefer to encourage my students to tell their personal stories. Every story has already been told, but it’s the way someone tells theirs that makes the difference.

How does Montreal influence and shape your style?
I adore Montreal. There’s no other city I can imagine myself living in. Perhaps Chicago, or maybe Taipei. But no, not even. Every time I come back from a trip, even if I loved my travel destination, I feel like I’m coming home. I feel a profound sense of freedom here. I feel supported in my work and in my life. I feel free.

yinggao.ca

A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 11 with the title “Free to Be.” Subscribe today.

The homes with their slightly pitched roofs and Santa Fe block style are hard to come by in this desert metropolis of 3 million people, so when she found her dream house on a corner lot, she jumped at it. The home itself inspired the rest of her design. “The spirit of the house is slightly vintage, though vintage for Dubai is 1980s since the city is only 50 years old,” she laughs.

Nada is known for her soft, organic object and furniture designs—everything from curved couches and low, elegant tables with no harsh edges to playful lighting and mirrors that make spaces feel warm and lived in.

Because Dubai is, she says, such a highly charged city, she wanted her own home to be a place of respite. The color palette inside the house is at once delicate and earthy—pinks, yellows, and light greens to reflect nature. She’s also a big proponent of painted ceilings, and when you walk in the main living area you’re enveloped. “It’s one block when it’s completely painted, so you’re walking into the whole room, and you feel the space is complete.”

The home feels very green considering it’s in the midst of an arid landscape. Nada worked with a landscape architect to design the garden with plentiful indigenous plants and local grasses. Every room of her house overlooks the garden, and no space or material from the site is wasted. She reused brick found all over the property to create garden furniture. “I didn’t want everything to be brand new. I wanted it to feel like it’s a place that had a history,” she says.

While the house can act partly as a showroom if someone wants to touch and feel Nada’s designs, the space is designed for her to truly work and live in. Tables, chairs, shelving, lighting, rugs—most of what makes up the interior design of the house are Nada’s own pieces. “I wanted to challenge myself and see how many of my own things I could put in the house, but without it feeling like too much.” The final result works, as the house feels calm yet lived in, comfortable, not overstuffed. Every piece of furniture and art has room to breathe. The main living area was Nada’s biggest challenge. Placing her circular Zen sofa was a result of necessity, as the house didn’t have a good wall to put a couch against, and Nada didn’t want to block any windows. She tried something like 10 different arrangements before landing on circular seating. “I felt like putting something circular would break the linearness of everything. It was a different solution from the typical, and I think it’s important as a designer to show something a little bit different from what’s expected,” she says. “I wanted to challenge myself. Most people wouldn’t put something circular there; they’d put some sofas facing each other.”

Her solution works beautifully, grounded further by the Oculus carpet—inspired by the oculus in architecture—designed by Nada and made in Afghanistan by women carpet weavers as part of the Zuleya by FBMI initiative to empower women in that region.

Nada’s bedroom, painted a beige blush color, is one of the home’s most compelling interior designs—as unexpected as it is inviting. “I wanted something very warm,” she says, adding that the design is a combination of her identities, with Japanese style tatami flooring she stained juxtaposed with Middle Eastern design elements. She chose her own colorful Tatami tables and a low Japanese style bed she customized, placing the bed in the middle of the room when she learned the feng shui rule to never sleep under a pitched roof. “The room is very fresh and earthy. I wanted it to be down to earth to have the same spirit as all the grasses outside, so it reflects a lot of the spirit of the garden.”

Nada filled the house with artwork mostly from friends who inspire her. “They’re successful artists, but they happen to be friends,” she says. In the dining area hangs a photo from Beirut, graphic design in style, taken by her friend Dia Mrad, an architectural photographer based in Beirut. “That’s actually where the 2020 blast happened. It’s a memory, but we can’t tell that it’s from there,” she says softly.

Nada arrived in Dubai shortly after the explosion in Beirut that claimed hundreds of lives. The catastrophe was followed by economic crisis there. Nada says she panicked a bit at the time, wondering where she needed to be. “I thought, ‘I need a Plan B.’ I already had a lot of clients in Dubai and the Middle East who really appreciate the work I was doing with craft. It was something that was not so common in that part of the world, and so it crossed my mind: Why don’t I give Dubai a shot?”

Nada has had many homes, though, and everywhere she’s lived shows up in her work. She grew up in Japan until age 18 and moved to the US when she was 23 to study at the Rhode Island School of Design. She then moved to London after she got married and had her two boys there before settling in Beirut, where she started designing furniture more seriously. She opened her first showroom in Beirut in 2003. “I had no intention to be a brand or anything, but it became a brand because it seemed like I had found a niche in the field of furniture.”

Back then she says studies were more focused on interior design or architecture generally, with not a lot of emphasis particular to product design. “Product design kind of didn’t exist, so I found this untouched, unexplored market—especially with craft,” she says.

“People were kind of ashamed of their own craft in Beirut in the early 2000s. It was old-fashioned in their mind. But then I came in with a new perspective, and I was able to take that traditional craft and turn it into something a little bit contemporary. I added a design element to traditional craft. It took on a life of its own.”

Over time she started to get so much interest that she says she became a brand almost by accident. “It was more like I was resolving my identity crisis because I couldn’t figure out if I was Japanese or Arab or Western. The furniture gave me the answer, which is that you can be all of the above. So my work is very much about identity, and it’s about craft, and it’s about contemporary craft and making it relevant to everyday life.”

It was a risk, but Nada felt Dubai was ready for something new, whereas before she felt they were more interested in long-established brands like B&B Italia or Cassina.

“These were brands that are known, and it makes people feel safe that they have a known brand,” she says. “But now there’s this new generation of people who are looking for something a little bit more niche. This is where I come in because my products are a little bit more specialized, and I customize. I felt that there was room for what I do in Dubai.”

Nada has been in her new home now for about two years and has successfully created her own artistic escape as well as a place where she can entertain clients and friends. “When people come to my home they feel like they’ve traveled somewhere else because it feels disconnected from the city,” she says.

Maybe she’ll get a few more sculptures or artwork, but mostly she thinks, life here feels complete.

nadadebs.com

A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 10 with the headline “At Home in Old Dubai.” Subscribe today.

Artificial intelligence, mobility, beauty, function—Yves explores all of these in his work and looks for it in the work of others, like Sophie de Oliveira Barata in East Sussex, England, who founded the Alternative Limb Project. She designs and creates innovative prosthetics that often double as highly stylized and wearable art pieces.

We recently sat down with Yves and Sophie as they talked about their work and how design, technology, and beauty can overlap to benefit humanity. —Laura Rote

Sophie designed the “Vine” arm to be alternative in style, control, and function. It has controls in a shoe that move the arm with sensors connected to Bluetooth. Courtesy of Suede

Yves Béhar: The physical, self-affirming, expressive approach to the body and prosthetics is something I noticed in your work. I’m very happy to see it taking off for you and being a strong practice for you. How did you get into this field?

Sophie de Oliveira Barata: I have a special effects background. I studied art initially; I wanted to go into fine art, and then I was working at a hospital at the same time. I’ve always had art and medicine running parallel.

I got into special effects thinking maybe I’d go into the film industry. I was fascinated with merging reality and fantasy. I was interested in the medical world and decided to use my skills with prosthetics to learn how to make prosthetic limbs for amputees.
The job of making realistic limbs and matching to skin tones for amputees, allowing them to blend into society, was rewarding and ultimately challenging without the tricks of the camera. It was all sculpting in silicone—sculpting by hand and thin layers of different colored silicone, then I would color different skin tones and apply.

“There really wasn’t anything out there to celebrate people’s differences.” – Sophie

I learned to make fingers, toes, partial hands and feet, full arms, and leg covers. Because I was more creative I would get the more intriguing jobs or ones that required a little bit more imagination. There was a little girl I started seeing who had a realistic leg made every year through insurance. She wanted something a little bit different, something more personalized. She had all these images on her leg. Every year I would get her really excited about what she could have next time. I noticed that from a rehabilitation perspective, it was the design aspect that she was getting excited about. Rather than a version of what everyone else had, she had something quite unique; she started engaging with her family and friends about it. I thought, ‘Oh, there’s something here. This could be more like wearable art. We could go really sculptural with it.”

Then I found Viktoria Modesta. I looked up “amputee model;” it was a really crude web search. There was an image of her on Beautiful Bizarre magazine. She had her leg, kind of a realistic looking leg, just to the side, which in 2011 was quite bold. No one was really doing anything like that. She was modeling, doing hundreds of shoots at the time, and in just a handful of them she showed that she was wearing a prosthetic. I read about her having a self-elected amputation because of problems with her leg. It went against what everyone was saying around her. For her it demonstrated strength. She never looked back. The idea of having something quite alternative and celebrating her difference really excited her.

I started dreaming up ideas, and it spiraled from there really. At the time there wasn’t really anything like this out there. It was the bare prosthetic, or making it blend in, which I’m totally for as well. It’s all about choice. But there really wasn’t anything out there to celebrate people’s differences and an extension of their personality and taking ownership in a completely different way—and from an arts perspective.

I started meeting people from all different walks of life—ex military, performing artists. They all wanted people to see what was there as opposed to what was missing. It was that psychological aspect. It was removing the pity from the situation and bringing about enhancement and excitement and changing the conversation.

Yves: What I find very interesting is where you started—the film and special effects area. When I was in design school at ArtCenter many years ago my thesis partner and close friend was studying industrial design but went into special effects. He ended up doing a lot of special effects, but I find that imagination and craft in the movie industry interesting, where things get very sci fi and exaggerated very quickly. You went from that world to a world where you’re making something people can use every day. It’s not just for fantasy but something that is both functional and expressive of who they are and what they want to do.

Sophie: It’s that blending of the worlds that really excites me—that merging fantasy with reality. Doing prosthetics for film was fun, but it’s really rewarding doing it for real people. Also without the tricks of the camera, it’s super challenging to try and emulate the human body, which is forever changing. Films kind of influence reality and reality influences films, right?

Yves: I’ve joked around that creativity takes different forms; it can be utopian or it can be dystopian, but in the movie industry or in the media in general dystopian scenarios sell more. In design you have to instill a positive impression of the product. People want to feel smart and served by the things we make.

We try to instill—and you do that as well obviously—a positive level of thinking and self-affirmation in what we build, especially the things we build that people walk around with or live with.

Sophie: How do you feel about the word transhumanism? Do you feel that relates to any of the work you do?

Yves: As we become ever more digitized in our everyday life, technologically influenced in our everyday lives, I think it’s very important that the work of technologists and designers be humanistic in approach and less technological. Obviously there is a fear that these plugged in technological parts…

Sophie: Have a mind of their own?

Yves: Yeah, or are not entirely under our control. If anything we need more human connection, not less moving forward. You can see the issues percolating in a very big way with teenagers and technology and with sexuality and technology. There is a lot going on that can be quite dehumanizing and may not serve us as well as spending time with other humans.

When you start putting technological, digital parts or additions to our personas and personalities, we need to be very conscious—it shouldn’t take us away from our humanity. I try to have technology support us and be a partner. I always want technology to be discreet and in the background, not something that changes the nature of our conversations and our social interactions.

Sophie: That’s really interesting, and interesting that you said it’s associated with a lot of negativity, moving away from the human aspect. I’m not sure I should use the word transhumanism, but I guess the pieces I’m working with are like replacements, aren’t they? They are additions, but they need to be there regardless. In terms of design the human is completely at the center of it. You want this technology to reflect them in some ways.

Yves: Your approach, and somewhat mine, is supporting the human the way they are today—to get back to walking or have social connections and human connection. I grew up as a young designer in San Francisco in the Bay Area, and in the late ’90s I went to a couple of cyborg conventions where people were walking around with big backpacks and visual enhancement features and computers that were in the periphery of their eyes and whatnot. It was super interesting to see, but not something that stylistically or relationally you felt was serving their users so much.

Sophie: People automatically jump to films and think of robotic arms. It’s interesting because in prosthetics, a lot of upper limb amputees or people born with limb difference don’t bother wearing prosthetics; they find them really cumbersome, or they have all the technology, but they’re really heavy and the battery wears out quickly. They end up using that other arm anyway.

Yves: What’s your approach to the functional parts because that is, as you said, very challenging and heavy from an engineering standpoint? How do you solve those functional needs? I see the benefits in terms of cosmetics and personal self-expression, et cetera, but robotics are hard.

Sophie: Ultimately the best design is function and aesthetics. It’s like a triangle. You’ve got the fit and the function and then you’ve got the aesthetics. If you want to really push something, then sometimes other corners have to suffer and it becomes not an equal triangle anymore.

If you really want to make a point, and some of the pieces I made or collaborated with others on to make are more concept pieces; they’re not every day. That’s more driving the idea of something from a really strong artistic angle, and then people can fill in the rest. I’m not trying to make something functional every day, but that could be done, too. It just depends on what the goal is and what I’m working to do. If I’m working with a realistic limb, for example, I will work around the componentry that has been fitted by the prosthetist, usually wrapped in foam and snapped to mirror the other limb. I take a cast of this and work on the cast to create the skin. I remember making some realistic hand skins to go over the bebionic, which is a really powerful electronic hand, when it came out. It was being done for the military. It looked like an ET hand. I was like, “Can you not just embrace the technology underneath this?” That robotic aesthetic is now a dominant aesthetic.

Vine for Kelly Knox. Photo by Omkaar Kotedia

I know people who use little sensors—they’ve got so many sensors in the fingertips and they’re doing research—and I just feel like that is being done already. I’m interested in the alternative functions.

The most alternative piece I’ve made that I’m proud of working with other people on is the Vine arm, which was alternative in style, control, and function. It had controls in the shoes, and when she deliberately moved her bigger toes against each sensor it Bluetoothed to the arm. The socket was gold plated, and the socket that housed the electronics was 3D-printed in clear resin. The vertebrae sections were also 3D-printed. When she moved her toes they would hit the four sensors and send a signal to move the vine in any direction.

I’m interested in coming at prosthetics from a fresh perspective and exciting all people about the body and differences.

Do you cater to aesthetics in your work?

Yves: Oh, absolutely. People need to be proud to wear something. They need to feel like it’s not a visual or an aesthetic that puts them in the category of patients, or doesn’t create this feeling of being marginalized. It’s very important to have an aesthetic that brings curiosity. This is something I noticed with, for example, tennis players or skiers who wear knee braces; they’re quite proud of it. They’re proud of whatever that looks like—usually very mechanical, very masculine. People don’t want to be overly burdened, sometimes by something that is medical, and they want more control. They want to feel like they’re in control of the way a support or enhancement looks.

“One of my principles of design in this age of robotics and AI is to be very careful to not create emotional dependency on these products.” – Yves

Aesthetics are very important to all of these projects, and they also project the right impression. I never want our products to create dependency, for example. If it’s too cute or cuddly it tends to create an emotional dependency that replaces or skews human relationships. If it’s more like a beautiful piece of furniture or body enhancement you can be proud of, it feels like you are more in control of it. One of my principles of design in this age of robotics and AI is to be very careful to not create emotional dependency on these products. I’d rather have them appear in people’s lives more like a companion you can decide to have in the foreground or not in your life, not something you feel dependent upon.

You do have to deal with a lot of fears people have toward things that are mechanical or digital or technological, as it comes into their intimate lives, as it comes into their homes. For example, it was really an interesting sociological experiment I was doing while we were developing the Happiest Baby SNOO, the smart bassinet with Dr. Harvey Karp. For about five years people would ask, “What are you working on that’s exciting?” And I would always say, “I’m working on this new project; it’s a robot that takes care of your baby.” It was a slight provocation in the way I was presenting that, and immediately people’s imaginations went exactly to my description, which is a robot carrying your baby around or taking care of it. 100% of the time as a response I got, “That’s not going to work. I would never do that” or “That’s scary.” It’s a normal, absolutely important reaction.

Sculptural piece for performing artist Lucky Love. Photo by Alun Callendar

As designers it’s important to hear those fears. While I was doing the project, obviously I was designing a robot that takes care of infants in the first six months of life, but we designed it as a beautiful piece of furniture that sits in the parents’ room or in baby’s room in a way that doesn’t advertise its technological capabilities, even though it does perform what parents describe somewhat as a miracle for them on a nightly basis.

Being aware of how much the technology or enhancement becomes self-expression and style, and outwardly owning that becomes very empowering. It becomes empowering to say yes, this is a separate arm, but it’s on my real arm, and now you think it’s cool, and we can move on and talk about other things. I think it’s affirming for somebody with a difference like that.

Sophie: This guy who was military said to me, “I really want to see my toes, but everything else you can be really playful with.” I took the hairs on the back of his neck and put them on the toes, and then the rest was quite abstract. The foot was removed from the leg—as in there was a distinctive separation with this graphic look of tendons and everything going on to the forefoot. It was quite designed; it wasn’t gruesome at all. I went for a walk with him and we got stopped straight away. This guy was like, “Wow! OK, so that’s your leg, right? OK. Hang on. That’s your foot. So what’s going on up here?” The military guy was just like, “Well, how can that be my foot? It’s obviously not my foot.” Then we had this humorous conversation. He was like, “That was just so refreshing.” In the past it would have been pity or people not wanting to look. He said it was like he had the upper hand—like he was playing a trick and confusing people in a positive, dumbfounding way.

What age is most accepting of the technology you provide?

Yves: Different technologies address different conditions, and the projects we work on are aimed at very specific groups of people. I find that this is really important to me—using the latest technology, the latest AI, the latest robotics to serve people who typically are not addressed by design. Design and technology tend to address people in the comfortable, middle part of their lives when they’re in good shape. Mainstream tech tends to be general purpose, and that’s also often when we run into trouble because these general purpose technologies don’t perform as well as we expect them to. On the other hand, tech and design focused on health care or education for the old, the young, and people with specific conditions delivers successfully and makes their lives better.

When you are serving an aging person or somebody who needs to walk again after a stroke, when you are serving a kid with a learning disability or new parents who basically need more sleep, technology is very good at solving specific problems for underserved people. It’s important for both parties, meaning it’s important for these humans in need to have these solutions, and it’s also important because technology is getting such a bad rap. It easily triggers fear when you see robots carrying objects or doing backflips or running aggressively toward you—these robot dogs that give you a sense of danger because they have an aggressive looking stance. Technology gets a bad name as it’s often superfluous for everyday life. On the other hand, it has real purpose when it addresses real and specific needs.

It’s very important to show that technology is much more like a companion—a companion to an aging person, a companion for a child or a young student, a companion to a parent, rather than something that looks like it will or can take over our existence. I also think technologies work better when they’re more narrowly focused on solving a problem in my life because it’s built for that purpose; built for purpose is important versus built for entertainment or built for general purpose. “I want a robot that cooks and cleans for me.” To me, personally, that’s a lot less attractive and creates a lot more fear.

Sophie: What inspired you to get into this industry?

Yves: I always felt like design was about service. Design is a generous field. We think about our users as the most important part of any project. Seeing how little attention there is to user experience, comfort, personal expression, to pride of use or ownership and medical and health care and well-being types of device and experiences. There’s a huge gap in what people experience in the business or commercial world compared to what they experience in the health care environment. There’s a huge gap in design for consideration of people’s needs and feelings. Design creates that type of connection, that type of success, and that is needed both commercially but also emotionally for any of these projects to do well. People need to consider them something that really complements all the facets of their lives, not just a functional appendage.

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