Your Long Hair sconces transform intimate domestic rituals from your Indian upbringing into sculptural lighting objects. How does exhibiting these deeply personal pieces in the context of Lyle Gallery’s “Outside/In” show—which explores designers working outside traditional systems—change or enhance how you hope viewers will connect with them?

The context of Outside/In feels like an especially fitting frame for this work. The Long-Haired Sconces are, at their core, about the quiet power of things often left outside the canon—domestic rituals, adornment, softness, cultural specificity. These are rarely centered in the design world, which has historically prioritized functionality and universality over ornament or ritual.

Showing the sconces in this context allows us to be more direct in asking viewers to sit with the tension between what is considered “essential” and what is dismissed as “excess.” These forms, inspired by braids and built through a material vernacular, become a kind of resistance—inviting the audience to recognize these rituals not as peripheral, but as deeply formative and central. We hope people connect with that invitation, whether through memory, materiality, or the emotional pull of softness.

The hemp-lime composite material you’ve used for the braids in your sconces is traditionally used in architecture rather than decorative arts. What challenges did you encounter when adapting this sustainable material to such a delicate, intimate scale, and what unexpected qualities emerged in the process?

Working with hemp-lime at this scale was both humbling and experimental. It’s a material more at home in walls and insulation than in fine objects, so our first challenge was understanding how to make it feel supple and light while maintaining structure.

The intimacy of the form—these ‘braids’—demanded a kind of tactility that architectural applications usually avoid. We had to unlearn precision in favor of softness. Drying times, hand-mixing, slight inconsistencies—they all became part of the process. What surprised us most was how alive the material felt. When cast and coated in limewash, it revealed a textured, almost skin-like surface that invited touch. It echoed hair in a strange and beautiful way—fragile, strong, soft masses shaped by hand.

You’ve described your work as exploring “softness” across multiple dimensions—from tactile qualities to cultural associations. What specific element or detail of the Long Hair sconces best captures this ongoing investigation into softness, and what’s the story behind developing it?

In this work, we are remembering braided hair as a symbol of the soft rituals that made home—of Sunday afternoons, slow and sacred, mothers oiling, massaging, combing, braiding, our sisters lined up in front of us—a quiet choreography passed down through hands. Of Monday mornings that followed, a hurried, disciplined weaving for school—parted and precise. Of special days, hair adorned with fresh jasmine or jewelry. And of repeating these gestures here, for each other, as two long-haired adults, far from home in India.

The way the braids drape physically translates that softness—how they fall, gather, or stretch across a wall becomes a way to echo the many expressions carried through hair: joy, ceremony, frivolity, or restraint. Just as we shape our hair to reflect feeling or occasion, these sconces invite a similar expression—one that holds memory and form with care.

As designers who move between India and America, how does your cultural position as both “insiders” and “outsiders” in different contexts inform your design decisions? Is there a particular aspect of the Long Hair sconces that reflects this unique perspective?

We often feel like we’re translating in both directions—offering what’s deeply familiar to us to those for whom it feels foreign, and re-encountering our own cultural rituals with fresh eyes in a different context. Much of our practice lives in that space: sharing personal stories and domestic gestures from where we grew up in India with an audience here in America.

It’s a privilege to tell those stories, but it can also feel like we’re permanently on the outside. Even within the design world, there are quiet expectations—categories we’re placed into as immigrants, as “other,” as fringe. At times, it feels like we’re present, even celebrated, but not quite inside.

In our work, we try to hold that tension without smoothing it over. We look for softness within it. The Long-Haired Sconces are a reflection of that approach: they embrace a homely, cultural ritual—quiet, repetitive, often unseen—and place it at the center. Braiding, adorning, caring: we elevate these not as embellishments, but as the concept itself. As memory. As portrait.

The sconces become lighted portraits of ourselves—of the rituals that shaped us, the care we still carry, and the experience of belonging and estrangement at once. That feeling of otherness, of duality, is what makes the work personal. It’s what makes it ours.