OIC 001: Helen Molesworth and the Art of Everyday Objects

Helen Molesworth has spent a lifetime considering objects. A renowned writer and curator, Helen served in curatorial roles for over twenty years at institutions like the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Helen has made a career of pushing against the traditions of the institutional art world to broaden and diversify both the work it represents and the people it reaches. In 2016, she curated the exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957, presenting an ambitious range of work that gathered objects across art, design and the everyday. The exhibition illustrated a way of thinking and being difficult to capture within the walls of a museum. In this episode of Objects in Conversation, Kalon co-founder Michaele Simmering sits down with Helen to talk about design, resonance and the art of the everyday objects that shape our lives. 

Transcript

Michaele Simmering: A renowned curator and writer, Helen Molesworth has spent a lifetime considering objects. Recognized as one of the most dynamic and influential voices in the art field, Molesworth has made a career of pushing against the traditions of the institutional art world to broaden and diversify both the work it represents and the people it reaches. For twenty years, she served in curatorial roles at institutions like the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Last year, she published Open Questions: 30 Years of Writing about Art which gathers essays she has written over three decades. Over time, Molesworth’s work has blurred and challenged the boundaries between art and design, yet her thoughts on design have rarely been heard.

On this episode of Objects in Conversation, Helen Molesworth discusses her deep study of Black Mountain College; the narrative potential of objects; and — through her well honed curatorial lens — offers a deeply personal look at the meaning of everyday objects in our lives. 

From Los Angeles-based design studio Kalon, I’m Michaele Simmering and this is Objects in Conversation. 

Thank you so much for doing this. 

Helen Molesworth: Thank you for inviting me. I feel very flattered. 

MS: That is mutual. I was first introduced to you through your Black Mountain College exhibit. 

HM: That makes sense. 

MS: That exhibit was also, I have to say, one of my favorite exhibits I've seen. So without going into all of it, because it was a huge exhibit — big enough you wrote a huge book about it — I thought maybe we could have you talk a little bit about it. 

HM: Everyone, when I said, I want to do a show about Black Mountain College, everybody told me it couldn't be done. That you couldn't make an exhibition about an art school. That the material was too far flung. That it was a story not an exhibition. And so the more I heard that, the more I dug in my heels.  

Black Mountain College — for people who don't know about it — was a college that existed from 1933 to 1957 in North Carolina. It was a liberal arts college that put the arts at the center of its education and was interested in what it meant to create citizens. Like, what does it mean to think about education as not creating a professional but creating a citizen? And what does it mean to have an art school that maybe doesn't make an artist but makes a citizen? That, to me, is so utopian.  

And then what happened there were things that were extremely craft based — like furniture making and pottery and weaving — were happening at the exact same time that the avant garde in America was being born. So you have people like John Cage exploring silence, or Merce Cunningham creating his dance troupe or, Ruth Asawa making sculptures that were suspended from the ceiling, and Robert Rauschenberg inventing the combines. All of that came out of this incredibly rich mixture where craft and art and reading and practice were all being given equal weight.

I have long been aware that I was interested in things that were authored. And once I learned that clothing could be authored and furniture could be authored, once that happened, I was like, 'Oh snap, the history of the world can be gleaned from any object.' And I wanted to bring everything I knew from art history into those arenas to see what could happen. That was basically Black Mountain for me. 

MS: What you said taps on so many different things that I would like to talk about. There's so much content out there where you've talked about the art world, and very little when you talk about the design world; I want to give you this space to talk about it and your love of objects.  

What you're talking about, these connections to objects. One of the pieces that I most connected to when I saw the exhibit was the set of dishware by Mim Shivonen. Thinking about those and their presence in the show — because those were pieces that were made with a very functional purpose, they were probably going to go furnish a room, rather than an experimentation with sound or silence — I was curious about what those pieces were doing in the exhibition? 

HM: Well, it's such a great question, because a lot of what was made at the college was made in a utilitarian way, same with the pot shop. I mean, at a certain point, I think people were drinking out of Karen Karen's mugs [laughs] you know, at school, which is kind of incredible. The question you ask about what the bowls are doing in the show is such an interesting question to me, because I wanted to see if they could be in the show. To me, that felt like one of the most experimental things about the exhibition. Could you show that stuff in the same room as an Annie Albers weaving and a John Chamberlain sculpture? Could it hold its own against those things?  

I do have this idea that a great object has so much information in it that, if you start to tease it out, you could tell a story much, much larger. If we really teased out that iPhone on that table, we could spend the rest of our lives on it. Where does the glass come from? How is Gorilla Glass made? How does it work? You know what poor, weaker slave was involved in the production of this thing? The whole world can be spun out from it. And I wanted to see if those plates could do that in the show too? Could they hold that much narrative potential? Could they hold that much meaning? And formally, could you see the same degree of intentionality in that as you could in some other things? And I think some did, and some didn't. 

MS: For me, the tableware did it because the material choice was so radically different. A bowl is the most everyday object; we all interact with bowls and plates on an everyday basis, but we're used to them being made in a very particular material. And seeing these very familiar shapes made from wood was radically impactful for me. 

HM: Oh, wow. In what way? What did it do for you to see them? 

MS: So we're very material focused here, and I think sometimes just a swap of material can jar you enough that it re-introduces an item to you because you're just seeing the work differently. It raises questions. Why has it always been out of ceramic? Is it going to work in wood? Is it the same thing? Is it different? You know, what's one doing? What's the other doing? What's the history there? When did we start doing it out of ceramic? And each material lends a different texture and tonality and so there's a different intimacy with them. And wood is so intimate. 

HM: Yes. For me too. 

MS: I really connected to that piece. 

HM: What's interesting to me about what you're saying is that you just did a retinue of the kinds of questions that the bowls in wood pose. And in doing it, you literally did a kind of Joseph Albers teaching which is to take the most basic thing and turn it into a question for yourself, rather than something you know. For Albers, it was color. We all think we know what red and blue are and Albers would just show you again and again that [laughs] blue doesn't look like blue anymore if you put it over here. That quality of teaching you how to think about what you see.  

I think what I'm curious about — particularly because part of the 20th century avant garde mandate is to have this relationship between art and life — there were so many designers who came out of the Bauhaus, who came out of that tradition, who really believed that if they made better glassware where we would have a better life. All those utopian impulses became interesting to me.  

I don't think I'm a Luddite, but I do think that things that are made with intention have something different than things that are made just for profit. I would say, I can go into a Chelsea gallery and see things that I think have been made just for profit. And, I can go into an IKEA and pick up something and think this was really thoughtfully made, someone actually thought through a lot of this.  

I think sometimes art and design are different because, as you say, they're asked to behave differently in the world. But I do think that there are certain kinds of objects that seem imbued with the residue of the decisions that have gone into making them. And those objects have always been interesting to me, whether they're this chair you're sitting on, or they're painting on the wall. I'm interested in things that feel full of human investment

MS: And is that what you're talking about when you say 'authored'? 

HM: Yeah, I guess so. For instance, the chair you're sitting on [gestures towards Oxblood Material Studies Chair]. I don't know who's designed it; I don't know if it's you or someone else. The specificity of that color is bonkers to me. It's not red. It's not purple. Anytime you've got to begin in negation, that's super interesting; because it's something that's trying to achieve a thing, partly by edging out something else. It's also a chair that feels like it should be in wood, but it's in metal. So that's interesting. The metal is really hard and cold, but the color is starting to soften that. Because the color is the way it is, I start to approach the object differently. There are all these planes. You could have made a hard joint on that arm, but a hard joint hasn't been made. Instead, there's a softening moment. That's happening in my brain while we're talking. I'm doing all that kind of work, and I would be doing a very similar kind of work if there were a painting in here that I were interested in. The content might be different, but the structure of what my brain is doing is the same...Or, it feels the same to me. 

MS: So what’s interesting to me about what you’re saying is that the traditional buckets of art and design don’t seem to really matter to you anymore — at least in terms of how you engage with and respond to objects. They seem blurred. 

HM: Well, I feel like it would be disingenuous to say that the buckets don't matter, because they do matter in the world. The way we treat a painting and the way we treat that chair would be really different... up until you get to MoMA. MoMA could collect that chair and put it out on view and give it a label and then, all of a sudden, that chair would be asked to stand in for not only chair-ness but a chair made in LA in the beginning of the 21st century. So I feel like even though I might be making the blur, the world doesn't make the blur. I want to be utopian and say 'it's all a blur,' but I also know that it isn't. 

MS: It's complicated what you're circling around there. For me, one of the distinctions between art and design is function, another is how the maker understands the existence of the work. When creating a painting, for example, there's a sense of permanence and foreverness, that the work will go on to be cared for — maybe even cared for forever by humanity in a museum. When creating a piece of furniture, at least for us, lifecycle is always there. End of life is always present. How long will it last? What happens to the piece when its time is done? That's a very different mental state. And, furniture is to be interacted with. It's not to be looked at. It's to serve a function. At least for me.  

The New York Times just did this piece on the greatest design objects. The click bait title is "Is this chair the most important design object ever made?" And there’s an image of that white plastic chair that you've seen at every outdoor gathering,

HM: Right, right, right, yeah, yeah.

MS: I think that's great because that's the reality of design; that it's out there. Everything is designed. Somebody somewhere made a choice. That thing was made for one reason or another. For example, the shape is what it is because it had to conform to a plastic mold, because that's the production technique that they were using, because that was the most affordable. Or, it's going to be an indoor piece and it has to be soft. For me, design is much more bound up with function in human life.

HM: Right. Right.

MS: Even though I believe that design can, and should when it's done thoughtfully, be able to convey quite a lot. 

HM: I find it really moving that part of the distinction between art and design for you is the lifespan of the object. And that, of course, that is art's great, sort of "false" or "compromised" promise Ars longa, vita brevis. You know, like art is long, life is short. There is a really, really deep truth to that. 

Last fall, I went to Pompeii for the first time. I had never been, have you ever been? 

MS: I went once. It was phenomenal. 

HM: It's... fucking mind blowing. 

MS: Yeah, it's pretty incredible. 

HM: Yeah. And you realize there like, aaaaah, Damn, we've been doing this for a long time, and we think we're so new. And maybe we are really not new at all. 

So maybe part of the problem with art's grandiosity is in fact, that it doesn't imagine itself having a lifespan. Maybe part of my love of design is a way of acknowledging lifespan. Death. Which is something I'm obsessed with trying to figure out how to acknowledge. 

MS: Right. It's a hard one.  As a designer, one of the things that I feel the most empowered by is that in a designed world where everything is made — and I am somebody that believes that the objects we live with inform the way we interact with our world and even explain to us value systems — if you can build and design in that space, you have this kind of superpower to build towards the world that you'd like to be in.

Now, I don't know if that's a big ask of an object. I can think about all those things when I make it, but how much that object can carry it forward and impact the people that are using it — I have high hopes — but I don't know how much it can really do. 

HM: I have a lot of belief in those. In the object in space. I may... and this is also maybe what I mean when I say I'm a fetishist, and I say this slightly shamefully... I worry less about the objects than I do about the people. I have this joke whenever I'm in a doctor's office or the dentist's waiting room. I look around and I think, if this were a sound, no one would be in here. Everyone would understand this was so horrible. They couldn't be in here. 

MS: The doctor's office?

HM: Yeah, the waiting room. All those decisions, like the scale of the chair, the fabric that's been used, the wall, texture, everything about it. For me, I am dying a small, horrible death that no one understands. [laughs] But I also think it's why people don't feel good in those spaces. They just don't know because people actually aren't taught a lot about form or proportion or textures or color relations or any of those things. They're not taught that wood is intimate. They're not given enough opportunity to know how different this is [touches a solid wood sofa frame] than a wood veneer. What it means to feel this. To know that it will develop a patina... that my body oils are starting to do their work. All of that, you know.

MS: So with you and objects, is there a particular object that you think of, that you really love? One that you carried around through your life? Or that you have a personal connection to?

HM: You know, I'm a purger, not a hoarder. I throw things away. There are a few things I've been toting around with me since I was an adolescent, and one of them is a small, painted wooden box. Oval. No larger than my hand. Fits in my palm. Lidded. Painted in a kind of loden green with a white and yellow floral design on the top. The paint is quite thick. It's very much a hand painted thing. And I bought it with a 10 franc piece that I had stolen out of the pocket of a long camel coat that was hanging on a hook in the hallway in an apartment in Paris my parents rented that we were living in. 

MS: Wow. 

HM: So everything about it: this long hallway, this old bohemian apartment — my father was an academic, and so he was there teaching, and we were in someone else's academic apartment — and this camel coat, which was very sumptuous... As a 13 year old, putting my hands in these coat pockets in the hallway and finding this 10 Franc piece, and knowing that the person wouldn't miss it. I slipped it in my pocket and I bought this little box at the gift store at the mosque in Paris where my mother had taken me to have tea. I have carried that box with me everywhere since I was 13. I know exactly where it is in my house right now. It's one of the very few things, but it says a lot about me. The stolen money, the covetousness, the scale of it, the thickness of the paint. It has you-could-make-it-yourself-but-you-couldn't-really vibe. Over the years, it's had different things in it, you know, jewelry, so on and so forth.

MS: I love the way that certain objects can correct memories from our own lives and carry them for us. It's a really beautiful thing.

HM: It's really beautiful. It's really, really beautiful.

MS: With what you're saying — when an object that you find in IKEA can have a resonance when it's made in a certain kind of way — if that's what design is, design with a capital D, where's that line? And, how do we draw it?

HM: When faced with a question like that, I immediately realize 'Oh I'm a fan; I'm not an expert.  I don't have a lot of expertise in the field that I’m actually the most interested in now, which would be design. Part of me is happy about that...likes to preserve a little bit of my amateur self. And part of me is — part of me knows — if I had known that there was a thing called interior design in college, I absolutely could have ended up in interior design. Like, there are people who sit around and look at rugs all day?! What!? How do I become one of those people? You know, [laughs] I didn't even know. 

But so where would the line be? I mean, I had a friend a long time ago who had a great joke. She said, you know, good design makes you happy, and bad design goes everywhere.  When I speak about art, I speak from a dual place of expert and fandom. And I've tried to preserve my fandom in order to make my language accessible to other people. Because the language of expertise is exclusionary, and the language of fandom is usually much more open. 

Unfortunately, I think, like art, there's a lot more bad art and bad design than there is good art, good design.

MS: Yeah, it's funny, though, because when people are looking at art, they know they're looking at art. When they're looking at design, they have no idea. They've completely forgotten that connection to the made world which is where design lives.

HM: No they don’t.

MS: Except for — and this is another question I was going to ask you about — this emergence of collectible design which is relatively new, it's about a decade old, and it's sort of taken the design world by storm. It's very much design moving into the art space. What makes something collectible is a limited edition work. I think it lifts out of the vintage world where there are pieces that have become collectible, though, once upon a time, they were mass produced items and not intended to be limited for any particular person. 

HM: Would you consider this collectible design? Your sofa? This collab?

MS: No, because it's not editioned. I consider what we do very much old school production design, where we're trying to make repeatable pieces accessible to the largest number of people. Although, that is a very complicated thing.

HM: Indeed. 

MS: I think we believe here so truly in the functionality of pieces, like I told you when I emailed you, a tool is one of my favorite designed objects. I love tools. I think they're so cool. And in fact, last night I was thinking about the Shakers who made this tong, a salad tong, which I feel like is the perfect example of a well designed object.

And that's very much not a collectible. It gives me a little bit of an identity crisis or a confusion - the collectible design space. I haven't totally wrapped my mind around it and how it's functioning. Though I'm so grateful for the attention that it's brought to design. But how it fits in historical project of design, I don't know... But I feel like you, because you have your expertise in art, and you see the two spaces — and it's really a blurring of them and a merging of them... 

HM: Indeed, it's interesting. I've never had a fetish for a vintage Eames versus a new Eames. I think they were made to be mass produced; that's not where I draw my line. 

I mean, I think the aesthete in me — unlike many of my contemporary art curating peers — I was still interested in trying to figure out what taste was and how I was deploying it. It felt disingenuous to say that I was interested in something rather than I liked it sometimes. And I was just like really? you're not going to cop to your taste, and what that means? And, of course, in museums, taste is really complicated, because we inherit the taste of the wealthiest people in our culture. So there's that problem.  

But I am uninterested in creating a condition of scarcity where there doesn't need to be one, and so I'm curious about what that means in collectible design. If you can, in fact, mass produce or do a production line of a beautifully designed object that's super functional and rings every bell, why create scarcity when you don't have to? That seems to be a play from the capitalist playbook that doesn't seem necessary to me. Or, why has the world of design been so open to capitalism's rapaciousness? You know, we'll take everything? We'll take all the oil, all the minerals, all the water.

MS: Well that part, that's a different part of the design world. I also don't quite understand forced scarcity. But being a designer in this country is designing in a manufacturing landscape that's very much structured for massive capitalist business. We don't have a system that's ready-made to allow a diversity of creativity in the product space. It's a slog to get out there. And I think maybe the one-offs are more achievable than the production. 

HM: That's interesting. So I'm gonna float this. I don't know if it holds. I don't know if I believe it, but I was thinking that one of the things that really matters to me about art objects — and I think when I'm I might be talking very specifically about painting right now — one of the things I think a great painting does is it's able to hold a massive amount of contradiction without resolving that contradiction. A painting — because it doesn't have to be functional — is under no obligation to resolve its contradictions. Whereas this sofa is filled with contradictions, but they have been resolved. Similar with that chair. A great design object is an object that has solved the problem elegantly. And a great art object is something that is capable of letting all this contradiction — which is basically life — sit without pulling the levers of more-this, less-that, without any attempt even at resolution. Because I'm drawn to things that have contradictions in them, opposing poles. Like, again, the sort of Don Judd quality and this almost baroque pattern mixing [gestures to the Kalon x Reath Sofa]  my brain's like [laughs] yes, but it's all been resolved for me.

MS: I mean, that sits well with my thinking. I'm comfortable with that, because I feel fundamentally that the objects that we live with, they kind of need to disappear into our life so we can live our life. They need to support it. So if there's an unresolved element that is just adding [noise] to already so much of what's happening in my life. I don't need that in my home space.

HM: Right. exactly.

MS: I don't need a tool I'm trying to use to have an unresolved hinge so that when I try to hit something it flops. Even if that makes me think about what I'm doing. [laughs]

HM: Right, right. A tool that doesn't work properly is a better art object than it is a tool.

MS: Correct. Right.

HM: Right. For sure.

MS: You talk about art as an information driver. What is your final take on that when it comes to objects? How much can we ask them to do? How much can we expect them to do in our lives?

HM: I don't know. I'm really thinking about your sense that part of what you want out of a design object is that it disappears. And you don't really want that from an art object.

I mean, I guess at the end of the day, I sort of have to cop to that they're in a hierarchy for me too. But I do think that there is something to the idea that the art object is carrying more than the design object.  But, maybe the way to go at it is that.... one of the things I'm interested in with design objects is that what they have to carry in is different than an art object. Every table is bringing in the history of the table. You know what I mean? It's bringing in the meaning of the table as 'work surface.' The table as 'coming together to eat.' It brings all of that. Every painting can pretend it's going to be the first ever painting, or the newest painting, or a painting that challenges the very idea of painting. But no table can challenge the idea of being a table and be a successful table. 

So there's something there, maybe, about what it is that the table can do. Ultimately.

MS: It seems much more subtle and subversive what objects can do in our lives. I think that they can suggest things. They can carry a value system.

HM: Right.

MS: They should, at their best, impact the environment we live in and — I'm pretty over this word, but — elevate it, or make it feel like a more elevated space that's comfortable. And, as you know, putting a piece of solid wood furniture into space has a wildly different impact than a piece of laminate furniture. 

HM: Yes. 

MS: It just changes the air. 

HM: Yes. 

MS: So I think it can do all of those things. And those, in a subtle way, are informing and teaching us about values. Like I believe that when we have the exposed wood and wood is present, that you can't help but think about where it came from at some point. 

HM: Totally 

MS: With a plastic piece that's very easily forgotten. Even though they also came from somewhere.  

You talk a lot about labor, the quotidian and taste. I'm most specifically interested in labor in the quotidian, but maybe I don't understand what you're saying as much about taste. But if you can just talk about those for a minute. What you mean by them?

HM: Well, for me, the quotidian is the daily. So it encompasses everything from a glass of water to dragging the garbage bin out to the curb. It does it all. For me, the quotidian is steeped in repetition. It's steeped in habit.  

I think for women, the quotidian is even another register. Because historically, it's been women who have tended to the home, whether in a paid position or an unpaid position. Whether you're the mother or the housekeeper, you don't get to have the daily without the daily labor. And so the quotidian and labor for me are really intimately related. It's both the dishes you eat out of and the fact that you gotta wash those dishes, and the fact that you needed to make the food to eat out of those dishes. It quickly becomes a network of objects and labor. They're super, super related to me. I also feel like they're related because they're the thing we were told for hundreds of years wasn't meaningful enough. And really early on, once I realized how deeply, intimately related the quotidian was to women's work and then realized neither of those things were valued very much in the culture, I got super interested in those things.  

And then taste is just endlessly fascinating to me, because there was such a mandate in the avant garde to get rid of it. And then there was such a mandate in the kind of punk or post punk ethos I came up in to have a form of taste that was aggressive toward this respectable taste. Taste was a way you could telegraph to somebody what your values were and who you were. And I think it's still totally that. It's just that it has such a — from my generation, I think — such a negative connotation. And then, of course, as I got older and and my life also became more diverse — you know, like many people, I ran in mostly white circles — and then my life became much more integrated, and integrated in terms of class, in terms of race, in terms of ethnicity, and I realized, oh, this taste thing is hella complicated. It's so complicated. And I thought people don't want to talk about it, because it's so complicated.

MS: Well, because they're all signifiers, right? You're picking up signs for people, and you think you know them, you slot them.

HM: Yeah. I've got a pretty rigorous matrix in my head, and I'm pinning people to the wall. And I know I'm doing it, and I thought I should probably know more about why and how I'm doing that. And also to try and mitigate it, but also to understand it as information and knowledge that I am using so that I could do so consciously rather than unconsciously.

MS: I was reading your essay 'How to Install Work as a Feminist' and that quandary of — in all those awakening moments and thinking through things in those very complicated ways —  what's the solution? There doesn't seem to be a clear solution. There's a possible different way of approaching things, but the questioning in itself feels almost endless. There's not a lot of guides out there for the new way.

HM: No. And I wonder if that's partly because we grew up — all of us — in a culture that refuses to admit that there's class. Of all the people I know, Americans have the most underdeveloped language for how to talk about class. Which means we don't know how to talk about taste. 

MS: My very last question for you is about your podcast series. This is a whole new world that you've moved into — the one that you're doing right now for David Zwirner, these series of conversations with creatives about what it means to make things now — why that conversation and why now?

HM: I always wanted my work to be for artists. Like the idea that you went to that Black Mountain College show and that you saw those bowls, and you thought about those bowls and that they impacted your work, that for me is gold star. I can go to bed tonight knowing job well done. It worked! That's the ultimate praise. And I realized when I did my first set of podcasts for the Getty, that the thing that happened that was the most thrilling was that artists were telling me that they were listening to them in the studio while they were working. And I was just like fuuuuck, [laughs] I couldn't imagine no more of an omnipotent fantasy in my life. I'm the voice in your ear while you're working?!?!?! My God, I was beside myself with pleasure. So I think that's part of it.  

And also, I mean your sense that most people don't think about design, they don't understand that they live in a made world. I think that's really true for a lot of people who go to the museum too. They know an artist made the thing, but man are they confused about how and why, and what does the artist want them to think, or what does the museum need or want of them. I think I wanted to have some of those conversations to just open up the thought process for folks, and so that we could be sharing that a little bit. Like when Jonathan Anderson said he was interested in playing with gender when it came to design, I was like, great; so it's more than just making a pretty frock. I knew the minute he said that how many artists are in their studio figuring out what does it mean that I'm a male painter or female painter? A trans painter? What does that even mean? You know, so could those things be mutually helpful to other makers in a world that kind of doesn't care about the how of what we make, but only that it's made in the end and can be in a transactional market situation.  So could we have a conversation before the market had that conversation? 

MS: For me the last 20 years maybe but let's say most specifically the last 10 years — where there's been so much political paralysis and heartbreak about what's happening — for me as a maker of things, I think there's a huge sense of empowerment. It's like my activism. How I make my things and the questions I ask myself, what I can control, it's my own little universe. I can do it the way I want. That's where I feel ...those are the questions that I feel designers should be asking themselves. You know, why that material? Why this thing? What is the impact that it has? What are the systems we're pulling from? Where are we leaving them? When we're all — as a global community — so aware of so many things going off the rails that need to get fixed and that the big systems are not fixing them, we can tinker away on our side and try to shift the needle into different areas.

HM: And at that level, I believe romantic, naive or not — and this was, you know, again, my immediate lustful attraction to this piece of furniture — I want to live with something this handmade and this beautiful in which I can feel the intentionality of the people who made this thing. Because I actually want my life to be less violent because the world is so violent. And I'm going to start like right, right here.

MS: That's nice.  

Thank you, Helen, that was wonderful.