Month: June 2018

Perhaps long ago, on some dark night, Nashville native Ashley Balding reached through a crack of time, some portal of futurism, and pulled back the furiously innovative designs of Ona Rex, her line of luxury women’s wear.

From malleable dresses with slippery ruffles and paracord spines, to elbow-sweeping capes that belong in Lando Calrissian’s closet, to her iconic, freshly peeled gallery pendants, Ashley Balding’s designs demand a world to be built around them. I’d say that Balding is an alien that’s fallen to Earth, but as she shares in our conversation, that would be a terrible thing to say.

How did you begin your design practice?

My plan was to study fibers in school. I knew that I liked fabric, but design was not on my radar. I ended up leaving school and taking several years off, but I kept coming back to fashion. I went back to school [at O’More College of Design], still not thinking about design, but once I got into classes, I realized my brain was a little bit different from the people around me. I felt kind of stupid about it at first, until I realized it was a good thing.

I had no plans for starting my own line. It was something that I thought I would do later, like when I was middle-aged. But I just got so angry when I was out of school. There was such a small group of people here, doing something really good, but it was so tiny. I knew that I could add to that, only differently.

Did your definition of design change throughout that experience?

There’s a lot of clothing out there—technically, someone’s designing it—but there’s no garment innovation. That’s what I’m excited about. I’m not an expert and I’m still learning how to do that. I think my paracord stuff was the first time I was like, this is where it’s going where I want it to go. That’s not something you see everywhere. It changes shape on your body. If you want it to be a giant, puffed-up shirt, you can scrunch it all the way up, or if you want it to look like a more normal dress, you let it down. That’s the kind of stuff I get excited about—trying to think of how these flat shapes come together on your body and can totally transform how you feel. To me, I think that’s the most important aspect of design, is creating, innovating, reinventing.

I love structure—it could be a building, it could be sculpture—but there’s something about 3-D forms that are really exciting to me. I like the design process of linear things coming together, and I like to think of garments in linear perspectives. And color is a huge part of what I do. I can drive down the street and see a color, and it sparks an entire thing in my brain.

How do you characterize your role in the Nashville fashion world?

I just want to fuck everybody up. If I’m going to expend the emotional and mental energy of doing this—because it’s not easy, and a lot of times it’s very disheartening—I’m not going to make white T-shirts. I think it’s true in any creative field that you can feel overlooked sometimes, you can feel misunderstood sometimes. It’s really hard. What’s the point anyway, so I’m just going to do something how I want to do it. I’m learning to be brave about it.

It feels the most complimentary to me when someone says I’m doing something totally different, or that they’d never expect me to be from Nashville. Truly everyone here has been very supportive and are very excited about what I’m doing, but I don’t sell much here. I never have. I’ve always said that, that this isn’t my market.

Is that why you made the “Base” line? With the simpler shapes and colors?

Yes, and it sold the best.

It’s like a painter who makes a smaller, more affordable painting to pay the bills.

I’ve learned that if people have a taste of something they feel safe in, then they’re more likely to be like, if I like how I look in this, and that’s like a little more adventurous . . . I’m trying to put cheese out for people.

What do you think is your role in the larger Nashville world?

I would like to represent a modernized city. I grew up here, and I was very fortunate that my parents were very worldly and were excited to take us to other places. It’s important to me that I not be a representation of what Nashville was twenty years ago. There are good parts to that—I love tradition, I love heritage—but I want to represent a forward thought.

Is this a one-woman operation? Any plans for collaboration?

Brett Warren is my very unofficial business partner. I would never say that it’s just me doing this. He does all my photography. He’s my art director and my greatest support. He sculpts my necklaces, so he’s very involved, and I think we are each other’s muses in that way. In the way that I’m a little different, he experiences that in his field as well. It’s easy for us to be like, we’re doing something different, and it’s uncomfortable, but if we can help each other go along that path, we do.

Blaque of PORTmanteau jewelry, we will have a collaboration at some point. We’ve been working on one for a while, but it hasn’t become what we want it to be yet, so it just hasn’t happened. I would love to get into many different aspects of fashion, but I love her stuff so much.

Community engagement is at the heart of the Norf Art Collective, a group of artists that formed following 2015’s Norf Wall Fest.

Organized by Jay Jenkins (aka WOKE3) and funded by a Metro Arts THRIVE grant, the event transformed a courtyard in North Nashville into a canvas and brought together the artists that would eventually form the core of the Norf Art Collective: WOKE3, doughjoe, Keep3 and ArJae (aka Sensei). In the intervening years, the collective’s murals have memorialized civil rights leaders and sparked conversations of affordable housing and gentrification. They’ve honored the North Nashville neighborhood’s history and unearthed some of its roots. Norf’s voices—which extend far beyond its founders—speak clearly to and about their city, and above all, they’re making a statement of what their neighborhood’s future will be. This is design with people in mind.

Unlike other NDW interviews, this one had to take place over the phone, in which WOKE3 was painting (and making a pizza) and Sensei was doing some graphic work (and making a sandwich.)

How did Norf begin?

WOKE3–
I knew ArJae from probably the year before [the Wall Fest]. We did a poetry and arts fest together, and after, I started planning for the Wall Fest because it was my senior project. He was one of the first people I thought about [for the project] because I’d already seen his work, and one of his friends introduced us, and so that’s how that whole connection was made. Doughjoe I met probably during the planning process, and then again, the same thing: A friend of ours introduced us, but we kind of ran into each other just out biking every day. And Keep3 I’ve known since high school. Along with other artists like [Brandon] Donahue and [Sam] Dunson, we all were in this project, and we created those murals and everything like that, and that’s how Norf came out of the Wall Fest.

Why did you form the collective?

WOKE3–
If you had seen this space before [Wall Fest]—there was stuff on it, and stuff around it, but you had empty walls. After the Wall Fest, people loved to see it. They were talking about it, saying that they loved to come out and be able to see that. The reaction: Look how powerful we are when we come together. That’s really what it is, people coming together. Man, look how powerful you can become. That sparked like, we should come together and do something like this more often.

Speaking about “you’ve seen the space before,” what makes a good wall? How do you pick a wall, and how do you approach it?

Sensei–
It depends on the space. That can open up a lot of opportunities of what you can actually put on there, especially if there are pipes running outside, or it’s a weirdly shaped wall. Maybe it’s a little long in some areas and short in other areas. That can give you a little room to play with concepts and how you would go about doing it. Sometimes the wall picks you, and sometimes you pick the wall.

When has the wall picked you?

Sensei–
The “Workers’ Dignity” wall … It had some overgrown parts, and during certain times of year, it’s going to look full and flush. It was cool to think like, what kinds of colors could go there? We knew the time [constraint because it was commissioned], but now you get to play with the little elements that were already pre-existing, and you can either work around it or work with it. We definitely worked with it on that one. It kind of informed us, design-wise.

When you put this work up on a wall, it’s almost like it immediately becomes endangered, especially in a boomtown like this. The art could be knocked down as quickly as some great old building. With that in mind, what do you consider to be your role within Nashville?

WOKE3–
As artists—and this is me personally, someone else might look at things differently—as artists, we’re scribes. We tell what’s going on. We put it out there. If it’s me, I put it out there visually. Everything comes to me, and it becomes this story that I have to tell. As artists, we can speak to somebody subconsciously. If you look at a piece—and that’s why I love public art and why I think public art is very important. If you’re just driving down the street, you might not be looking out for things that are going on. You’re just going through your day-to-day routine. But as you see a mural on a wall that’s just huge, that has little girls sitting in a broken house or something like that, that’s talking about home. You’re going to stop. You’re going to think or feel something. … As artists, we don’t have to do anything for people. We can just stay in our studios and paint. But you know, I started off doing graffiti, so I always wanted to push a message out.

Sensei–
It’s finding out what your social responsibility is as a creative. For me, it can’t be just focused on the self, especially if it’s public [art]. The ideas are for everyone else. Keeping that in mind, what is your social obligation, and are we being responsible? Imagery is very powerful. How Woke had mentioned the opportunity to penetrate the subconscious and to really spark something in someone who might be casually going back and forth in their commute or going to school, you can have something very self-serving or very detrimental, or you can put something up there that sparks a conversation.

So your work is speaking very intentionally to a community. What has that community taught you turn? I’m asking because I heard that a man pulled over while you were painting the mural of Jimi Hendrix and told you that he was dressed differently than what you had, that he wouldn’t have worn that ’60s psychedelic look that we know him for.

WOKE3–
No, no, no, no! What are you doing?! [laughing] STOP. STOP. STOP. Oh man, that was funny.

Sensei–
Moments like that. They’re always teaching us. Part of that is being aware that art creates communication. It’s a form of communication that sparks communication. When the dude came over, he put us on game. Do you think that would’ve happened if we were tucked away in a studio?

WOKE3–
I’ve been meeting a lot of people, a lot of elders. They’ve always got some knowledge for you. They see where your work is headed, and once you talk about the subject, they want to put what they know in. They tell you stories about the neighborhood from maybe 50 years ago.

What else have you learned about the neighborhood?

WOKE3–
I learned about Club Baron from back in the day. I didn’t know about all those people coming in and playing, like Little Richie. There’s another club I’m thinking about—the Shack. My dad told me about it. He said when he was young, he snuck up there and tried to get in. They wouldn’t let him in, but he said that place used to be jumping so much that the building would be moving, literally moving. They had that on Jefferson Street, and then you think about all that before the interstate coming through and destroying everything. We had a community inside—we didn’t have to go out, we had it here.

Sensei–
If we had that now, man. I know Ella Jean’s had its spot, was something that was going on. But it is kind of cool how some of those traditions are still there despite all the changes—the interstate, gentrification and stuff like that that we’re facing now. There’s still those pockets of folks that do gather and do really dope community-engagement things.

What do you see as the future for Nashville’s design community? Or maybe, what do you hope it will be?

Sensei–
I don’t know if I see a specific future, but a hope would be: being cognizant of what’s here and not trying to reinvent something. Notice the infrastructure that’s already here, the people that are already here, the culture that’s already here. It’s a big, beautiful city. In the four years I’ve been here, it’s become grafted onto my skin. There’s that phrase: We’re not place-making, we’re place-keeping. Whatever happens in the future, I just hope that that’s the general consciousness.

Picture your dream collaboration—the nature of that relationship, the mutual respect, humility, empathy, and, perhaps most of all, excitement. It might look a lot like what’s happening between Hastings Architecture Principal David Powell and award-winning photographer, artist, and entrepreneur Jeremy Cowart.

Jeremy Cowart, whose extensive list of accolades also includes speaker and published author, is currently working to build The Purpose Hotel, a for-profit hotel chain that’s in collaboration with nonprofit organizations. After Cowart’s successful Kickstarter campaign, David Powell brought the project to Hastings, where designs for the Nashville-based Purpose Hotel began to take form. Cowart is taking a hard look at the upscale hospitality industry, but he has also clearly found an enviable collaboration with Powell. The Nashville Design Week team wanted to hear these two creatives in conversation, so along with NDW members Lindsay DeCarlo and Cat Acree, Powell and Cowart shared their experiences, advice, and a peek into their working relationship.

David Powell–
Tell us about your first memories of being creative. Have you always been creative, or was it an a-ha moment?

Jeremy Cowart–
I was the youngest of three. My older two brothers were the stars. There wasn’t jealousy there; it was almost like they were my heroes. I was very content to not be the star. It was in seventh grade when I took my first art class. It’s not as though I was a master artist, but I was good enough to where I was like, oh, this is something I excelled at. At that point, I was not excelling at any academics whatsoever. So that was the first moment I was like, oh, I both enjoy this and I was good at it.

David–
You started with music, right?

Jeremy–
It was both, music and art. And then I had a band in college with my brothers.

David–
What was the name of the band?

Jeremy–
Threefold Chord. Terrible. Anyway, it was like they were the more talented, but I was the more discipline-focused. Once I could tell they weren’t as disciplined, I was like, alright, I’m out, I’m doing my art/design thing.

David–
Tell us about your first job and how that ended.

Jeremy–
Out of college, I worked down the road for Anderson Thomas Design. I loved being there. They were a big deal, and it was a big challenge. But I was not excelling, I was not learning quickly. They ended up firing me after probably about a year or so.

David–
What did he tell you when he let you go?

Jeremy–
I don’t remember the exact words, but what I heard was, “You’re not cut out for this. You’re not creative enough.” They suggested youth ministry. [Laughs]

David–
[Laughing] Because you’re really fun!

Jeremy–
It didn’t come across to me very well, but in hindsight, I needed that moment and needed somebody to tell me “no.” If I’m told “no,” it only pushes me further, to dig deeper into my design. So I immediately got another job. At some point I switched from print to web [design], and after that I jumped out on my own and started my own design company at 24.

David–
And then, photography.

Jeremy–
Yeah, digital cameras really became the thing, and I really needed a camera just as a scanner. I would always be shooting concrete and walls and textures to overlay in my design work because I was a Photoshop user. But all my buddies were musicians, so they were like, “You take my picture,” so I started taking pictures of my friends for fun. Those friends would get signed to record labels, and then labels would start hiring me, and it kind of took off.

David–
And so you ended up successful enough that you moved to LA for a while, doing this for . . . ten years?

Jeremy–
Yeah. In 2005 I decided no more design, only photography. I left my design company to shoot full-time. A few months later, an agent from Hollywood called me, wanting to represent me. She really took me from zero to sixty, from shooting local Nashville musicians to shooting on TV and movie sets in Hollywood.

David–
And now you’ve circled back to doing a lot of visual art again. You had a gallery opening, a couple of shows just in the last month.

Jeremy–
There’s something about commercial photography—you make a picture, and it ends up everywhere. I don’t get to experience it with people. Whereas, I did that art show that you came out to, and it was so lovely. Here’s an image, here we’re experiencing it together, and this is the only one. It’s not mass-produced. It’s the only one like its kind. It was so much more meaningful for me.

David–
So between art, music, and photography, and now writing, with a book—what’s the thread, the creativity thread, that you can weave through all of those different things?

Jeremy–
The thread for me is the intersection of creativity and empathy. So, how do I help people with ideas? How do I help through creativity?

David–
That’s a great lead-in to the Purpose Hotel. In a nutshell, the inspiration for the Purpose—tell us that story.

Jeremy–
I was minding my own business on a photoshoot in Los Angeles on April 30th, 2012. I was walking through a hotel that was standard in that way, and they had the room numbers designed like name tags. I had a brief moment of design inspiration: They rethought how the room numbers should be designed, and I was like, man, instead of a cool name tag, there could be a story. If you wanted, you could stop at each room and read a brief story. But what could that story be? I thought immediately of a child that you could read about, and then a dollar a night per room could go to that child. So for a hotel with two hundred rooms, you’re sponsoring two hundred children.

When I walked into the room, it was like a movie where everything transforms in front of you, because I saw, in real time, I just understood the entire room in an entirely different way. You hear songwriters talk about the song coming to them. Sometimes they come over a year; sometimes they come in a minute. This was one of those moments. I saw this big, vast building, everything connecting to causes and ultimately helping people in need.

I knew it was the right idea, but I did nothing for three years because I was so intimidated by it. So it wasn’t until 2015 that I kind of found the guts to start walking toward it.

David–
It’s a very, very different type of creativity. It’s a business venture as opposed to a lone, solitary art form or shooting [someone’s photo] or painting by yourself. It’s a lot of money and a lot of people that you’re engaging. Is that pretty daunting?

Jeremy–
Because I wasn’t brainstorming a new career that morning, I don’t feel like I can take credit for it. That was truly a divine moment where I give credit to God. It didn’t feel like me.

David–
So much so that you kind of ran from it.

Jeremy–
Totally ran from it. How does a freelance photographer build a 150 million dollar hotel first and then a hotel chain thereafter? That doesn’t add up. [Laughs] So I said no for three years. But eventually when you wake up every day and go to bed every day still thinking about it for three years, it’s like, OK, this thing isn’t going anywhere, so it must be time.

Lindsay DeCarlo–
So what was the moment when you were like, “OK, fine, I’m going to do it now”?

Jeremy–
One [moment] was flying over New York City and looking at the thousands of skyscrapers as you fly over New York City, and I had this very simple thought: All of those buildings had to start with one person and one idea. And this building is so much more worthy of being built because of its mission to help people.

David–
And you’ve met so many people over the years through your travels, and to be able to leverage all those relationships into one vision is incredibly creative.

Jeremy–
The hotel, to me, is not about a building or a hotel industry. It’s community, it’s nonprofit, it’s technology, it’s art, it’s painting, it’s design. It’s all the things that I love and am passionate about wrapped up into one [thing], whose goal is to spread out and help people locally, domestically, and internationally.

And now we should tell our story! So I’ll ask you how you found us.

David–
We knew each other from church, the previous church that both of us went to, that neither of us go to now. A long time ago, my wife, Carrie, and Jeremy were on the worship team together.

And then I just followed you on Instagram. After the Kickstarter, you had so many followers that I just assumed you already had people working with you, but I reached out and said, “I’m assuming you have an architect, but if you don’t or need help or an adviser or help with how it’s going to happen…” Just really wanted to help with the vision, because I believed in it so much. Your response was, “No, we actually don’t have an architect.”

JC: I think the biggest thing was your heart in the email. This is a business that I can just see when someone’s in it for the right reasons and when they’re in it for the wrong reasons, and it was very apparent that you got it.

David–
Anyone that knows me and knows my creative process knows that I’m all about the story. Everything I do, design-wise, needs to tell a story. That’s who you are. You are so much about the human touch, the relationship, and the story. This hotel is just relentless with storytelling. Everything has a story. I think so much of that comes from your heart. There’s a lot of people that are really talented at what they do in the creative field, but there’s something special about somebody who does it with the heart and the compassion that you summed up in your own creative process, and that’s empathy.

Jeremy–
We should do this every day, just…

David–
…just build each other up!

Cat Acree–
Do you have advice for a designer who is seeking to build a relationship like this one?

Jeremy–
It comes down to humility. So many people let their egos get involved.

David–
If there is conflict, it takes humility to really embrace empathy. It takes empathy to be able to care for the other person enough to work through a situation that would otherwise be that conflict. It is amazing how so much of the conflict that we have in our industry, at least, really is about a misalignment of goals. I’m just trying to make my money versus we’re trying to do a great project. Of course we need to make money. We’re in business; this is not a gift, it’s not a charity. Like the Purpose—that’s one of the things I love about it. It’s trying to be a viable business. What is the human goal? What is the economic goal? What is the impact on the city, the urban goal? As long as you’re clear about what that relationship is and what the roles are and what the goals are, that would be the advice that I have.

If we could pick anyone as the doyenne of Nashville’s design community, it would be Libby Callaway: former fashion editor and journalist for the New York Post, hunter of vintage and deadstock treasures, and founder of The Callaway, a branding and PR team whose clients include the wallpaper design duo New Hat and the 91-year-old European beauty company Erno Laszlo, as well as Nashville’s groundbreaking boutique hotel Noelle.

Callaway’s home is almost as well-known as she is, and her enviable, cluttered-to-perfection space is likely as recognizable as her long red hair. Paintings fill her living room walls from floor to ceiling; a mistletoe-adorned Christmas ornament hangs from her kitchen fan; necklaces drape over lampshades; and a staple remover with eyes has been placed near her kitchen sink. It feels like the whole layout could pick up and change in an instant—like design has never felt more encouraged to change.

How do you define design?

I think design touches every part of your life. Honestly, I’ve thought about that a lot as we’ve grown the Callaway, in that I want every decision we make for a client—every client we choose, every event we do—to have some kind of a relationship to an aesthetic world, and to have a point of view. I think that’s what good design is—it has a point of view. It’s happening a lot more in Nashville than it used to, which is really exciting.

Where are you seeing that?

Bubbling up, it’s the creative economy. It’s the small business economy where you’re seeing it, like the New Hat girls or over at Elephant Gallery, which I am obsessed with.

What is the goal of The Callaway?

We try to say we’re not a PR company because it’s kind of a concept that’s being phased out. We do public relations for creative companies, but mainly it’s figuring out ways for them to communicate their message to not just the press but to the public, and to engage people, whether they want them to buy something or talk about an idea or attend an event. It’s figuring out ways to help creative companies tell their stories.

I come from a journalism background, so for a long time, I always thought that there were two sides to the coin—kind of like Woody Allen, you’re either a New Yorker or you’re an LA person. [But] actually I realized about 10 years ago that I like LA, too! You can be both. You can hold these two opposing ideas at one time. I realized that the work that I had been doing post-working at a newspaper was really the same work I was doing as a writer. It’s sort of like business-to-business but it’s business-to-consumer. B2C instead of B2B. It’s figuring out how to tell stories in a different way, and that’s what I think we do.

Tell me about a project that you think has been especially successful and why.

I’m setting myself to talk about Noelle! Funny how I did that. I’m continually impressed with the Noelle owners in that they have really put their money where their mouth is in terms of engaging the creative community here. I’m really always very surprised that they continue to listen to our sometimes weird ideas or programming. … Our line is—it’s not a line, it’s the truth—there are over 55 local designers, makers or artists that are represented in that hotel, and that’s kind of a low estimate. There’s just dozens of people who are not megacorporations and do not have a lot of money behind them who have invested a lot of love and time in creating that place.

I think there are people who come in—and of course, I’m very attuned to it—I see even other hoteliers come in and been like, “We’re investing in the creative community, paying homage to Nashville, so we’re getting this designer to make a chair.” They’re not going as far as to hire tenured ceramicists to make all the ceramics for the restaurant, or getting Jessica Cheatham at Salt Ceramics to put a vase in every room.

How do you characterize your role in Nashville?

I feel like potentially a creative place-maker. Nick Dryden—a friend and someone I really look up to in terms of how he conducts his business—he talks about place-making a whole lot. If The Callaway’s doing our job right and I’m doing my job right, I’m figuring out how to create opportunities for that kind of place-making. It’s almost like an idea—not necessarily a physical space, just creating spaces for people to have creative experiences.

What do you think is Nashville’s greatest design strength and its greatest weakness?

I think weakness is listening to all the deep pockets that come in and wanting to put up monstrosities and terrible-looking apartment complexes. And I know you can’t say no when someone’s writing you a big check for a slab of property, but I feel like there have been aesthetic choices that have been made that were really dubious and that have now scarred our skyline and landscape, ruined neighborhoods. Not to use the word ruin—have challenged the aesthetics of our small neighborhoods.

In terms of strength, on the flipside of that, I think there are a lot of people who are really interested in engaging young thought-leaders, young design-leaders and different small companies, getting them involved.

I guess necessity is the other thing. I’ve got a lot of shit that doesn’t do anything. [laughs] But the things that do need to do things like lights, why should they be ugly when they can be cool?

If you could collaborate with any designer in Nashville who you haven’t already, who would that be?

This is the really, really cool thing about what we’ve been able to build over the last couple of years: We’ve worked with all the brands we really want to work with. I definitely want to get more involved in the interior design community. That’s something that’s personal, just growing up in the environment that I did. It’s just a lot more interesting to me right now than fashion.

Why is that? What are you seeing that you’re excited about?

I think the whole Memphis design movement, just that whole seventies and eighties European design aesthetic, that I was kind of, ugh, so over because I was a teenager in the eighties. But now it just looks really good and fresh and exciting and vibrant. It’s full of color. It doesn’t look like it’s stuck in this very upper-crust place. That’s really fun and joyful.

I think fashion has some of that, but I think fashion has just gotten over-commercialized. I don’t know who owns who anymore, and that seems to be all anyone wants to talk about. The choices being made in terms of all the designers going from house to house with really increasing frequency—I don’t feel like aesthetics are being developed in ways that they should, from the top down. And then of course the problem of fast fashion, which I’m just as guilty as anyone for investing in it sometimes. But I don’t know, I just don’t think that people are being very thoughtful. You have to be more thoughtful when you’re working with interiors because there’s a little more permanence in it.

From their first collaboration in 2014 with Dozen Bakery to the graphics and event design for last year’s Nashville Fashion Alliance Honors awards ceremony, their work signals a new generation of fearless creativity in Nashville. Portal Project, their hallway installation at Clay Ezell and Vadis Turner’s home that is a combination of hand-printed and screen-printed wallpaper and brass, is so cool it makes me want to cry a little.They’re also queens of collaboration: Diehl, a Nashville native, brings a fine art focus, while Williams, who has lived in Nashville for nearly 15 years, brings graphic design. In their East Nashville studio, the two women speak lightly and hilariously about their work. The launch of their first product line looms over them (a notepad on their desk has a to-do list; number one on the list is “LAUNCH”), but when it comes to New Hat, playfulness and joyfulness are unavoidable.

How did you find your way to your design process?

Elizabeth–
Just out of necessity. We wanted to start this business and be artists and work for ourselves, and that necessitated us working on commercial projects and connecting with people who needed us to solve visual problems for them.

Kelly–
The way we started was a way to make our artwork and large-scale work with no overhead. It’s spread kind of by word of mouth. We’ve gotten to the point where we want to introduce products as another stable revenue stream so that we can devote time to bigger, more impactful projects.

How do you define design?

Elizabeth–
What was the really dumb thing I read yesterday? ‘Design is a way of life and how it makes you feel. In a space. In a room.’ We’re in the middle of having to write statements about things, so we’re having to speak truthfully and say things that we’re passionate about but not in platitudes. It’s hard to answer those questions without seeming disingenuous.

Kelly–
Or vague.

Elizabeth–
I remember having a conversation with Kelly, because when you’re in your mid- to late-twenties, you’re asking yourself big questions. One night I was like, ‘What is art? What do I think good art is?’ It was a question that scared me because I had never asked that question in art school. … [Kelly] said the most profound thing to me at the time: ‘Is it true, and is it beautiful?’ That was so simple and perfect for me to hear, because I wanted it to be this analytical, heady thing. … I think I’ve been chasing after that feeling since then. That’s why we make design work, and try to make things better and clearer and more beautiful and surprising and delightful—all the things that you want to better your surroundings or better the world that we live in in a way that makes sense to us.

Kelly–
Design is always solving a problem, and doing so to the best of your ability and experience and history. I guess I separate design from art, with the problem-solving aspect. … Product design, any kind of design, graphic design, architecture—those are all born of some kind of prompt based on the material world and needs, whereas art comes from a more immaterial, spiritual place.

What three things influence your design the most?

Elizabeth–
I’d say architecture, art history.

Kelly–
And decorative arts history.

Elizabeth–
Wallpaper and pattern designs specifically.

What is your process for working together?

Elizabeth–
It’s definitely a conversation, and then we tend to get each other excited about something, and if we feel that energy spark between each other, we go after it. You can tell when the energy’s not there. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. Something happens that I can’t necessarily describe—an energy exchange that’s an unsaid pact that we make. Yes, we will carry on with this idea and see it to fruition.

Kelly–
Or even if we don’t know at the moment, it’s something that we can come back to.

Elizabeth–
Then Kelly may draw it out, and she’ll give it to me, and then the computer magic happens, and she helps me refine it. And then we go into the land of color, which is so deep and wonderful, and explore how the design changes because of that, and then we talk about scale. … It’s layer upon layer of complexity added to the process, and we’re both part of those decisions.

Kelly–
We trust each other’s instincts and ways of talking about things. It’s become this effortless build.

Elizabeth–
Which is totally unfair for the rest of the world because everyone else has to work with people that they hate collaborating with and they have to listen to podcasts that tell them how to work with other people’s personalities.

Kelly–
[Laughs] And then they try to do it alone, and it’s too much work, and they hate their failures.

Elizabeth–
We just think that we’re failing together, and then we can cry and talk ourselves out of it. Collaboration is very difficult, but we’re lucky that we work so well together.

Kelly–
We have a shared catalogue of visual references that has really gotten us going—geometric, architectural, minimal, playful.

And what’s it like to add in a client or third party?

Elizabeth–We’ve been able to do some weird commercial projects [because] people put us in this weird, kooky category. We didn’t have to do something that we weren’t necessarily proud of in the beginning, which is really lucky. Sometimes you just have to do jobs to make money, and then you get known for doing the thing that you don’t really want to do. …  We’re working with 8th and Roast right now, and they want a large-scale mural in their new location. They gave us a prompt to use some of the ethnic vocabulary and regions where they get their beans from, so we did this weird collage, more avant-garde thing, and everyone’s like, ‘I don’t know what the hell that is but I like it and I’m into it.’ We’re able to do something that’s weird and that they didn’t expect, but it’s not so weird that they can’t get behind it.

Kelly–
It’s not confrontational. We work with color and pattern, and those are things that are very familiar to all of us in terms of all these learned histories of textiles and craft.

Elizabeth–What we strive for a lot of the time is something that has a sense of familiarity that also seems foreign, and that duality is very important to us.

Kelly–
And right now, feminine crafts and work are more accepted and creeping into all these art and design forms. We’re seeing fibers, embroidery—it seems new, because it’s been this colder, more masculine environment up to now, but it’s like a rainbow explosion of more voices in design. Plus with Instagram, everyone wants STATEMENT SPACES.

Elizabeth–
[sings] Where’s my selfie wall??

How do you characterize your role within Nashville?

Elizabeth–
For us being younger women who are trying to have a voice in the conversation in Nashville, the fact that we’ve been able to do our business and people are supporting that is a testament that there is some value to design in Nashville that’s bubbling up, even if we are one of the only options [for what we do].

Kelly–
We’re trying to look outward more, within the community, to what’s been successful and trendy. We’re bringing that perspective. But just being the first can be a step forward for our microindustry in Nashville.

Elizabeth–
We really care about things like [Nashville Design Week], because we see that it will bring more attention [from] outward to inward.

Kelly–
There’s an intellectual capability to assess and live in and seek out high design, better design. It’s just a lack of options or precedence.

Elizabeth–
And manufacturing stuff, too. That’s not as available in Nashville, too. … There are a lot of people who can provide that stuff [in Nashville], but it’s not built in. Similar to the fashion industry, and that’s what Nashville Fashion Alliance is trying to do, with bringing more sewing and fabric and all the stuff you need to put together a collection.

If you could collaborate with another organization in Nashville, who would that be?

Elizabeth–
We would love to do something with Andra Eggleston, who does fabric and textiles, and that would just be easy. Do a wallpaper with her. In a more real way, I think the opportunity to work with Sideshow for Nashville Design Week is really exciting for us, because we do have a lot of sculptural ideas. Kelly is a sculpture major, but we don’t do a lot of fabrication ourselves. We do what we can, but we don’t have all this overhead with machines and space that can accommodate all of that, so [we’d like to continue] working with more production and fabrication people. And maybe to have a heavier hand in the future with any sort of development project, being more of a creative director role with an architecture firm that we love and adore.