I’m not sure if I was ever comfortable calling myself a designer. I’m increasingly less comfortable with it as the years go by. I do work in the design field though.

Design is the field where I have been able to apply my artistic sensibilities in such a way that I can generate an economic return.

i started making furniture because I knew how to make things.

There are some things I needed in my home, so I made them.

Some of my friends needed a bed frame, so I made them one.

I made my own bedframe too. I welded up a quick frames out of square tubing.

And then I used 2 plywood sheets, doubled up the edges, routered, sanded.

It’s been the same bedframe for the last 15 years.

I started making furniture because it was a practical application of my skillset that could fit into an economic exchange.

I make things, and share them on the internet, or in real life.

I make things, then showcase, or exhibit them in contexts that are designed to grab and hold your attention.

When the context, the object (a chair), and the right viewer come into alignment, something really magical happens.

Desire.

Desire emerges.

Sometimes it crashes like a wave on shorebreak, you’re jaw drops.

Sometimes it creeps up slowly, like a high tide - all of a sudden you need to move your blanket!

I don’t know how it happens.

I’m continually surprised of my own desires and how they shift and change, from season to season, year to year.

I like things now that I never thought I would like.

I do not like things now, and just a few years ago I thought it was the best thing on planet earth ever.

My thoughts, desires, and feelings change around the objects I use and live with, but the objects don’t change.

This week I’ve been stuck on a passage from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

The passage reminded me of a talk I gave before entering graduate school for craft and design.

For me, what emerged in my practice, as I began shifting my output to design objects (furniture) rather than art objects, felt like what this passage is getting at —

“An artist who wishes to exercise the esemblatic power of the imagination must submit himself to what I shall be calling a “gifted state,” one in which he is able to discern the connections inherent in his materials and give the increase, bring the work to life. Like the shoemake at the end of “The Shoemake and the Elves,” the artist who succeeds in this endavor has realized his gift. He has made it real, made it a thing: its spirit embodied in the work.'“

He goes on -

“Once an innner gift has been realized, it mat be passed along, communicated to the audience. And sometimes this embodied gift - the work - can reproduce the gifted state in the audience that receives it.'"

“Sometime, then, if we are awake, if the artist really was gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives.”

So good.

In the talk I gave in 2011, I said something along the same lines - “What I am interested in, is if I can invest a certain amount of energy into a group of objects, and then that energy can be transferred to the audience/user. It seems the most straightforward way to do that is to make furniture, so I’m going up to Portland to do that.”

Context: The MFA program I went to was in Portland, Or.

I made a hard pivot to furniture leading up to grad school, but I had never studied it or design, in general.

I applied to graduate school in Fall 2010.

I shit you not, when I applied to school, I thought Charles and Ray Eames were brothers, rather than Charles and Rae being husband and wife.

Fortunately, I started reading design books and go that sorted out before I arrived.

The first week of school, we were showing slide shows of our work to get acquainted with our cohort.

I showed a bunch of furniture projects, and the portfolio I applied with.

One of the fellow students asked, in a kind of snarky way, “Oh, so you love the Bauhaus?”

I replied, “The band?”

Y’all. I didn’t go to design school for undergrad.

I never studied design in school.

I took one elective undergrad class in product design while I was in my final semester of grad school, and I almost failed the class because I refused to design packaging for my product because it was wasteful. Lol.

As I’ve been updating my website and going back through my output over the years.

The thing I keep realizing is that I do very little design work.

Almost none actually.

I make things that are signified as designed objects; furniture.

I certainly have designated all the ways I want the components to go together - I definitely do the work of design from time to time.

But it is literally from time to time.

And even when I look at what I did in graduate school, and how I spent my time, and all the things I made - I didn’t make a lot of furniture.

Even when I did make furniture, it was only one component of a larger arrangement.

Thinking again about Charles and Rae Eames - and their output - it is always a pleasant reminder to me that furniture design was only a small percent of their output.

When I look at my own output, and the output I am known for - sometimes I feel that dissonance.

The furniture I sell is furniture that I designed a long time ago - the “design” energy that I put into the object doesn’t hum in the same way for me. It doesn’t have to, either.

The gift of the gift is when it is given.

If I’ve done my job right, that energy, the initial design energy, becomes embedded in the object and can still elicit desire, when someone else encounters it.

If I’ve done my job right, then it also doesn’t really matter if I am called an artist, designer, or craftsperson, etc…

Last note, which I find funny - on an Instagram debate about “branding’ in design, I made the case for not thinking of yourself as a brand. A colleague of mine, who teaches design, and has “zoomed” me into his class before, said, “This is such a disingenuous take for being known as the “Dancing Designer.”

It reminds me of they lyric by Josh Tillman who performs under the name Father John Misty

“… So why is it I'm so distraught
That what I'm selling is getting bought?
At some point you just can't control
What people use your fake name for”

An Artist Who Makes Objects People Call "Design"