The Flower Sconces started as an intuitive response to the 2023 California superbloom, but the meaning came later as you prepared to welcome your first child. How did that shift happen, and what was it like watching this simple four-petal form take on all these different emotional layers?

We expected the superbloom to feel overwhelming. Instead, it filled us with comfort and familiarity. Something about the sheer repetition of that one simple flower form felt tender and soft. We made a prototype almost the moment we got home, instinctively and without deliberation. Then it sat with us for nearly two years, persistent but unresolved.

Finding out we were going to become parents changed the nature of the looking back. The nostalgia we’ve always carried, living and working in the US while home is India, became something more active and anticipatory. The four-petal flower is one of childhood’s first drawings, repeated endlessly across chalkboards, notebooks, sand and dust. When we reconnected with it through that lens, all of its textures and colors started surfacing: chalk dust on slate, glass marbles catching light, mud between fingers after rain, bright neons, jellies, shoelaces. The same four petals, but suddenly carrying the full weight of a childhood. Each piece holds both the one we remember and the one we are beginning to imagine forward.

Each sconce uses different materials and treatments (resin, lime, glass beads, chalk, neon wire) to revisit the same childhood doodle. Walk us through how you decided which materials to pair with which memories, and how the making process for each version differs.

The form came first, and the materials followed as a kind of free association. We weren’t working from a list of memories and matching them to mediums. It was more instinctive than that: we kept asking what this particular flower feels like, and let the answer lead us.

One surface is textured like wet mud dragged through with fingers, the red earth of it immediate and physical. Another is cast in clear resin, smooth and luminous, embellished with pink glass beads that carry the specific whimsy of playing with marbles. There is a version as dusty and soft as chalk on a slate board, rendered in limewash. Another holds the plastic brightness of 90s toys and jellies in neon colors, one even dusted with glow-in-the-dark pigment, a nod to the stars stuck on childhood bedroom ceilings. One holds a more classic Indian memory: jasmine scrunchies draped around the flower form, the way hair was adorned for festivals and ceremonies. Each one returns to the same four-petal form but arrives there through a completely different set of gestures and materials, a different pace of making.

The colored cord that plugs each sconce in completes the doodle, a single wavy line that by turns makes the flower stoop, root itself, or float as if tied to a balloon string.

The looseness was important to us. In our practice we tend to move across very different materials and processes, building as wide a library of experiments as possible, and that variety felt especially true to what a doodle is: the same thing repeated across pages, never quite the same twice.

The Long-Haired Sconces return in Volume 2, this time exploring younger formations like pigtails, bobs, and ponytails from 90s Indian childhoods. What prompted the shift from the gravity of grown hair in Volume 1 to these earlier, more playful hairstyles?

Volume 1 carried the weight and presence of grown hair, the long accumulation of ritual. Volume 2 is about its beginning.

Becoming future parents made the shift instinctive. We began thinking seriously about what a soft childhood looks like, and these younger hairstyles became portraits of it: pigtails tied with ribbons, bobs, short crops, the hairstyles of school mornings and special occasions. Each one carries its own emotional register, joy, ceremony, play, but what connects them is the memory of having something done for you, with care and attention, for the first time. There is something in that gesture, of someone else combing and parting and adorning, that feels formative in a way that’s hard to articulate but easy to recognize.

It also made us more aware of how these rituals are passed down. Not through instruction, but through repetition, through the quiet continuity of one person tending to a younger other.

The exhibition was presented at Kartik Research, whose core tenet is reintroducing humanness into clothing. How did that collaboration come about, and what did it mean to have these pieces shown in that particular space during design week?

The collaboration was rooted in shared values as much as shared space. What draws us to Kartik Research is that their project, reintroducing humanness into clothing through craft and Indian making traditions, asks the same questions we ask ourselves. Not how to make something that looks Indian, but how to make something that thinks Indian. Both practices are working from the inside of a culture outward, finding the underlying philosophies and quiet behaviours rather than reaching for the visual shorthand of pattern or opulence that tends to stand in for Indian design in the wider world.

There is also something fitting about the specific conversation the exhibition was entering. Central to both bodies of work is an Indian sentiment we return to often: that adornment is not decorative excess but an essential human act. A door garlanded. A porch patterned. A braid adorned with jasmine. These are devotional, necessary gestures, acts of care, protection, celebration and reverence. To hold that sensibility while making work that is rigorously contemporary, handmade but not folkloric, Indian but not exoticised, feels like the shared project. Flowers in Our Hair found a natural home at Kartik Research because that understanding was already in the room.