Transcribed with Otter.ai
Guest Jessica Helfand
Unknown Speaker 0:02
Hey. Hey everyone, welcome to unique ways with Thomas Girard, an audio podcast got a truly esteemed and distinguished guest today, and I’ll describe her briefly. She’s an artist, designer and writer. She grew up in Paris, in New York City, and received a BA and MFA from Yale and she where she taught for more than two decades, she’s the founding editor of the design observer and the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism. She has a slew of distinguishments and distinctions and and awards, including being the artist in residence at Cal Tech, and she lives in Providence. Please join me in welcoming. Jessica helfen, welcome.
Unknown Speaker 0:41
Thank you, Thomas, are you ready for 20 questions? I’m ready for my 20 questions. I didn’t look at them because I thought it would be better not to. I glanced at them when you sent them, and we’re just going to go rogue. Okay, here we go. Number one, tell me a little bit more about yourself. What do you do?
Unknown Speaker 1:00
Sometimes I like to refer to myself as a recovering designer. I was trained as a designer I MFA in graphic design and photography, and I was a practicing editorial designer for many years, but for about the last 10 or 12 years, I’ve been migrating towards becoming a fine artist. And I think the connector for me may have been those books you mentioned in your introduction. I think that looking at words and pictures for many years and thinking about how they correspond to each other and correspond to all of us, at a certain point, I’d always painted, but about 10 or 12 years ago, I began painting really in earnest, and so I’m now really almost a full time painter. I still run design observer, which is celebrating its 20th year, but my studio practice really is a fine art practice now for the most part,
Unknown Speaker 1:54
that’s great. And just to note for our audience, I most recently came across Jessica’s work, I think, through her book about circular designs throughout history, beautiful reproductions of these circular graphics. So check out the book list as well.
Unknown Speaker 2:11
Number two, what’s a key piece of knowledge that makes you different?
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A key piece of knowledge that makes me different is that I
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think because I grew up with parents who were historians, and because I grew up in Europe,
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I have a tendency to always privilege History, Social History, cultural history, visual history
Unknown Speaker 2:42
in a way that is, I think, sometimes good and sometimes bad, but is really, it’s like a second language for me. I tend to really, I think about where we’ve come from and where we’re going, and I think that there was a kind of cultural dissonance for me working as a designer for many years, because I think, and I loved your opinion on this, Thomas, but I think that in many ways, designers self identify as arbiters of the future,
Unknown Speaker 3:12
and I often felt that I was, you know, pulling some string or operating On some frequency that did not really compute for the world I was primarily working in, but I think we were doomed to create our history if we don’t understand where we came from. So I do think it’s a useful skill, but, but I think it’s um, for me, it’s really almost like an innate second language, like it’s really part of the way i i process information is to think about historical narrative all the time, people, places, events, other languages, other ways of looking at things. And in some ways, it makes it hard to finish things and start things and stay focused on things. And probably for people who collaborate with me, it’s maddening. I once had a designer who worked for me who said that I was a cogent writer, but that I designed and I made things like an abstract expressionist. I’m a very sort of layered, process oriented person, and it does, I think, make it hard for other people, but the people who speak my language, it works very well.
Unknown Speaker 4:16
I like that you’re talking about design futures. We had a great guest, Dr Marco bevlo on, who wanted to gear his entire episode specifically towards design futures. I’m also Dr Ron Makari, who’s based here in Vancouver, where I’m reporting from, has been really focused on more than human worlds with his work and his most recent MIT book.
Unknown Speaker 4:37
Okay, number three, why this? Of all things? Why do you do what you do?
Unknown Speaker 4:43
I think about that all the time.
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I’ve had many parts of my life that have led me different directions. I was a serious cellist as a child. I was an actress when I was in college, as I mentioned, I trained as a designer, but there’s always been this artist, and in particular.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
A Portrait, face oriented person,
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sort of trying to get out. I do think that
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in my particular case,
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I realized only a few years ago that as long as I had a studio practice, I would be okay. And this was I lost my husband. I lost my father. I was during the pandemic at Cal Tech, as you mentioned in the introduction, away from my children. And I wrote this book on a series of essays on self reliance, that was published by Thames and Hudson in 2021 in conjunction with the seminal Emerson essay. And I think for me, it was a real crucible that period, as it was for many of us, being alone, but also really trying to think about how I would make sense of a world for myself where I could not depend on other people, I could not depend on work, I could not depend on the economy. I couldn’t depend on getting out of my apartment. I mean, it was really, as we all found, a very challenging time, and almost I’m making it sound like a religious experience, and it’s really not that. But I do think that once we understand what it is, we do.
Unknown Speaker 6:15
Your question is such a good one, Thomas, because it is a philosophical, existential question. There was a wonderful dean at Yale School of Art for many years, Andrew Ford, who’s a painter, and he used to tell the painting students that once they figured out how their minds worked, the paintings that they made would take off. That really, you know, we have so many influences and so many frustrations, and we all think we’re imposters, and the blank page is really terrifying. The blank canvas is really terrifying. But if you pay attention to the question you’re asking, and I look back to the person that I was when I was 10 years old, or 15 years old, or even in college and graduate school, and the thing that always made me feel that I could make sense of the world was if I was making something and that’s not sitting in a meeting, that’s not necessarily teaching, that’s not necessarily writing, but if I can be, if the inquiry that is in inside of me can manifest through the making of an object, that that becomes a way of interrogating my assumptions about something, and by conjecture, helps other People interrogate their assumptions, and I think that’s where I’m meant to be.
Unknown Speaker 7:25
That’s great, and it segues great into number four, which is, what does your future look like? My goodness, you know, I am. I am of a generation. My children are grown. I’ve got one in graduate school and one about to go to graduate school. I moved a year ago. I taught at Yale, Yale for many, many years. And you know, your identity when you teach becomes tethered to an institution. And once I left Yale, it was both terrifying and exhilarating, and more and more, it’s become exhilarating to be freed of one’s identity as relates to that kind of I don’t know. It could be a company, it could be a university. Could be what it is you do. And I’m hardly retired. I mean, I’m working harder than I ever have. But like, think what’s next for me is, is figuring out, what does it mean to have a studio practice? You know, this is a, again, an existential question of, sort of like a tree falls of the forest if I’m not exhibiting, if I’m not teaching, if I’m not publishing, what is my work about? How much is the work I’m doing about asking certain questions of myself and others, and how much of it is about the things you see people talking on LinkedIn, and you know, I was educated in Quaker schools, and it’s never sat well with me, this idea of believing in your own hype. I write books and I paint and I run design observer, and I do a lot of things, but I think that the more, the more I think about the value of the life that I have for however much longer I have it,
Unknown Speaker 8:59
the more I think that I want to really try to get clear about how to make sense of my work within the world, and hopefully the sense that I make of that work will make sense for others. And not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m I’m working very
Unknown Speaker 9:19
intensely with AI right now
Unknown Speaker 9:21
in my studio, in this very kind of the alchemy of artificial intelligence, for me as an artist, is about combining filters and randomized, one might easily say, robotic things that that you cannot control with the things that I can control. So if, if the AI brings artifice and randomization and generation and abstraction to a certain extent, I can bring in all the things that I know how to do. I can edit. I can visually edit. I can paint over something.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
I can undo something, I can erase something. And I’m really interested in in this next phase of my life. I think this is a big area of inquiry for me. I’m interested having written this book on the face that came out from MIT in 2019 in which I thought about bias and I thought about eugenics and I thought about
Unknown Speaker 10:21
selfie culture, and I thought about myopic vanity and how designers and artists are complicit in the making of the perfect picture. I have started to think about the kaleidoscopic lens with which AI lets me generate multiple perspectives, which is, I think, a much more authentic
Unknown Speaker 10:43
human way to think about like the likeness, the representation of the likeness, which is to say, you look in the mirror, what you see is not what I see. I see you flipped. You see me flipped. There’s a whole idea that I think somewhere along the line, that the art of portraiture, which is, of course, rich and robust history was really dominated by this idea of perfection, the Perfected pose, the edited paired down sort of hyper aspirational
Unknown Speaker 11:13
idea of a narrative that could be controlled by the artists. And I think what AI brings us is this messy, complex, not nuanced, and yet sort of remarkable series of other visions of ourselves. And it is very weird. And a friend of mine recently said, you know, you look at AI generated art and you think you’re you’re stuck in a bad high school art show, and that is true, but
Unknown Speaker 11:38
I, who am not ever been described as a patient person by anyone who knows me. It has taught me a kind of patient studio practice. And studio practice. Working with technology at this level is a fascinating, unwieldy thing, much like the artists in the 60s who worked with the chance operation, Rauschenberg and Johnson, even Merce Cunningham, the idea that you would actually, you know, roll the dice, and something would, you know, be chosen on your behalf, and you were sort of allowing there to be some proxy element in your practice. I think that’s what AI is for me. And so it’s a very long answer to your question, but it’s an important question. And I think if I were to frame what’s next for me, it’s that as this very rapidly developing technology is changing our lives and really introducing all kinds of questions about all kinds of things we haven’t thought about at all. And I don’t know when this podcast comes out, but I will say we’re recording this in March. And one of the best things I read on this subject of what we don’t know was published this weekend in the New York Times by Ezra Klein as a podcaster like you,
Unknown Speaker 12:43
really beautifully expressing the uncertainty which I think a lot of people are afraid of, which same thing happened when Photoshop came out, same thing happens when cars came out. We know that some of this is just the fear of the new but I think if we can get past it and think about the degree to which we are capable makers and editors and thinkers and adjudicators about incoming information, that we will be able to find a way to make use of this technology to expand
Unknown Speaker 13:11
what is, in a sense, you know, the limits of time. It lets you actually multiply yourself in a way that that, I think is really fascinating, and I’m very excited about what that’s going to yield coming up.
Unknown Speaker 13:24
Great. Yeah, so glad to hear you talk about AI. We had a great guest, Alex to shoot on who’s exploring typography and AI right now. And I think there’s a lot of a lot of questions around that
Unknown Speaker 13:35
number five. And feel free to interpret this. It’s let’s talk about location. How does the notion of place play into what you do? It’s such a poetic question. This one for me.
Unknown Speaker 13:47
I was raised in cities. I was raised in Paris and in Philadelphia and in New York and New Haven, always urban settings. I didn’t learn to drive till I was 26 which is why I think driving still thrilling
Unknown Speaker 14:01
at my advanced age,
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I love not being in a city. I love not living in a city, and yet, I’ve just moved to one for the first time in a long time. I raised my children in the country,
Unknown Speaker 14:12
and even living in a college town, I was living outside of the big garden and dogs and children. And
Unknown Speaker 14:18
I tend to get overwhelmed in cities, and I think better when I’m quieter, when I can quiet my mind by being a little closer to nature. What I love about Rhode Island is that you can’t be more than 15 or 20 minutes away from water,
Unknown Speaker 14:33
which so I now, I’ve now moved to Providence. I’m living temporarily in a beautiful coastal village, about 30 minutes outside of Providence, while I wait for my studio to be done, my renovating a live work loft there.
Unknown Speaker 14:49
But I love it. I like being for me location, one of the things that’s really important to me is be to be within an hour of an international airport, because I spend quite a bit of time in.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Europe. My children are both on the East Coast, so I like to be on a train line to get to them. And I think if one of them moves to the moon, and one of them moves to, I don’t know, you know, Eastern Europe, I’m going to have to figure out how to negotiate that. But at the moment, I will be living in a city that has great culture and art, but also is on a train line and near an airport. And I think for me, that that matters, being able to get to the water, being able to get to nature. I’m not one of these, you know, super duper hiking people. I don’t want to leave you with that impression, but there’s something about the cacophony of a city and the insistence of of movement and speed that, you know, my brain and life move fast enough without urban catalysts reminding me to just go faster and do things. So I’m I’ve been migrating steadily north. I was born in Philadelphia and spent quite a bit of time in Europe, and then went to New Haven, and then I’ve now come to Providence. So if I keep going north, I guess I’ll end up in Maine someday.
Unknown Speaker 16:03
But I love it here, and I love New England. And I fought for a while about living in California, but it was just too far away from all the people I know and love. So sorry, California. I know and love some people there too, but people that I’m close to are here.
Unknown Speaker 16:18
Great. Number six is, if you had to start from the beginning, what advice would you give your former younger self
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to trust my instincts?
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There’s a beautiful
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the Diebenkorn Foundation recently posted on, I think, Instagram, a beautiful note that Richard Diebenkorn, the California artist, wrote to himself, and I’m going to paraphrase it, but it was something like that. The first thing was, it was only in a sketchbook in it, and it said really big and really big, capital letters, trust the landscape.
Unknown Speaker 16:53
And then underneath it, it said, it all went to hell today, but tomorrow, maybe it’ll be better. And that idea of trust the landscape, the landscape could be your inner landscape. It could be your heart. Love who you love, love to do what you love to do, don’t I think the idea that we live in a place social media has made this like a really thorny, prickly proposition, which is the seeking of consensus. You know that put something on Instagram, you put something out there and people don’t like it. You feel unliked. You feel unloved. What does that do to a young person’s psyche? What does that do to a young person’s sense of self? I think looking back, I mean, we all have to get there in our own time and in our own way. But now that I’m a more mature person. I wish that I had trusted myself. I had very, very supportive parents. I was fortunate, but even my supportive parents did not want me to be an artist. They wanted me to be a designer or an architect, because they thought it was a more remunerative path to stability, because they had grown up during the Depression, and stability was important. I would never think of saying that to my children, and I don’t blame my parents, but you know, it’s not it’s not lost on me that my painting really took off after my parents died, because I could actually just believe in myself and move forward with something that I felt was important. So having written the book on self reliance, which is really just a series of essays written for young people, really with them in mind about what it means to trust your instincts and trust your gut. And it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have friends and compatriots and collaborators and community to get you where you need to go. Those things are extremely important. They’re essential.
Unknown Speaker 18:39
But I think the emphasis on not paying attention to your own view of the world, or that that comes second is something that I wish my younger self had trusted in more so trust the landscape from Richard diebenkor, and I think we can all take a page out of his book, and he wrote this to himself when he was, you know, I think an older person, just to remind himself to just trust Him what He was doing
Unknown Speaker 19:05
great. And what’s a day in your life? Like,
Unknown Speaker 19:11
what’s a day in my life? Like,
Unknown Speaker 19:14
well, I get up very early if I’m writing a book. I always have to write early when I’ve when I’ve written on deadline. I don’t get on my pajamas, so I won’t have, you know, any temptation to leave the house because I have to write something.
Unknown Speaker 19:28
I tend to be clear first thing in the morning. It also means that I fold up like a tent by nine o’clock at night, as friends of mine have told
Unknown Speaker 19:37
me, I am a pretty serious yoga Pilates, person only, because I just need to move my body. Talk about trust in yourself. I really, I think that the centeredness with which I approach the world is better if I can do the micro adjustments needed to get my head on straight, also, first thing in the morning. So you know, coffee, writing, thinking, yoga.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
A
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by nine o’clock I’m ready to, ready to do things and and at the moment, I will say that I begin the day thinking about how much I have to do for design observer before I can get to my painting,
Unknown Speaker 20:13
which is kind of I might think sometimes of design observers my third child. And I think about, you know, does it have its vitamins and does it have its
Unknown Speaker 20:24
lunch for school? And there’s a kind of custodial overseeing of design observers needs, which is, which is a funny way to characterize it, because, in fact, I have Its small but mighty team all over the country of wonderful people who are helping us figure out what it means to look at the last 20 years of design as an inflection point in bigger things, and in that sense, I will say that this, our 20th anniversary celebration, is really about looking at 20 we’re getting give 20 awards, and we’re looking at where design has made an important, transformative and lasting impact across a range of disciplines, including medicine and science and
Unknown Speaker 21:01
politics and music and architecture and advocacy, and we’re not giving awards for branding. And you know, Lydia modeling, there’s plenty of places that are honoring that extremely important and well deserved work, but it would says item server has always done well, is looked beyond its own purview at what the world needs and is and can be. And of course, in 2003 it was a very different proposition. It was before Facebook. It was before social media. It was really, really different time to be thinking about design and engagement with ideas. But I think as we close out this chapter of these 20 years, and in spite of a very turbulent economy, not only in the United States, but all over the world. As we both know, it’s a hard thing to look at finding money to support the efforts of some scholarship program and a number of awards, but we will get as far as we can get. And so the day is really for me, you know, wake up and take care of myself so I can take care of design observer so I can then paint
Unknown Speaker 22:03
beautiful number eight, lifelong learning is a popular topic. How do you stay up to date?
Unknown Speaker 22:09
I read a lot. I read a lot of unusual things. I i talk to smart people that are smarter than I am a lot. I have two extremely close friends who are his intellectual historians at Yale. One’s a historian of science and one’s in philosophy. And I have to say they’re 20 years younger than I am, and they are and have been so important to me and my growth in the last 10 or 15 years, as they have been to my children. We have a when I lost my husband and my children, my children lost their father, and we lost my my father, it was a it was an important intellectual kind of world of people who came to the dinner table full of stuff to talk about. And these two friends really filled for me that gap, and have expanded it and introduced me to their friends and their world. And I think this is, this is, again, comes back to Design observer, I I have found the things that make me feel alive, intellectually and emotionally and connected to the world, are not doubling down on my professional connections. I love them. I care about them. They’re meaningful to me. But I think the world is about more than the sum of its parts. And so for me, the things that I read I you know, and some of this is reverse engineering. Thomas me, for example, I have a great deficit in my mind around fiction. I became a grown person who raised a family and ran two businesses and was a painter who really never had fiction. So one of the great things about being in the studio when I’m not making things that require language, in other words, I’m not editing something or designing something and involves type, is that I’m thinking visually and emotionally and in terms of narrative and history about a lot of things, which opens my mind to fiction. Ergo, when the pandemic hit, I started to do fiction on tape. And so, I mean, my God, I worked my way through 20 John le Carre books and the Alexandria quartet and Doris Lessing the golden notebooks. And right now I’m 30 hours into, I think, a 42 hour Maggie Gyllenhaal narration of Anna Karenina, which is unbelievable. So each thing begets the next. And I it’s not that I’m going to become some expert in Russian historical literature, but I find that it just kind of amplifies some cultural hunger I have for words and pictures in a different kind of way. And
Unknown Speaker 24:44
it’s funny that I mentioned pictures there, because sometimes going to a museum for me is like, too much. I have to go and look at one thing and leave. I can’t I go to London a lot. I go to the Victoria and Albert Museum. I go to one floor and I just look at Corona or just look at, like, one hour.
Unknown Speaker 25:00
Like I can’t sometimes my appetite for these things is bigger than my stomach, and so I have to, have to ration myself. But
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I think travel, you know, as much as I’m able to travel, it’s not about the going to cultural sites. It’s about just getting in the car and driving. I drove 700 miles between Portugal and and Spain last summer, I’m going to Munich into Italy again this spring. I do a lot of different kinds of travel to just see the world and read newspapers and try to open my mind to different ways of seeing things, which is important if you live in the country and are in your painting studio a lot. I mean, I do feel the need to, you know, get out of dodge once in a while. But it’s not about, you know, bucket lists. For me, it’s about enriching something I think, quite a bit deeper.
Unknown Speaker 25:47
Great. And nine, what tools do you use? Can you talk about how your digital and analog?
Unknown Speaker 25:53
I do a lot on my phone.
Unknown Speaker 25:56
There’s the phone, there’s the iPad, there’s painting I project on paintings i i paint on top of photographs. I I’m a kind of equal opportunity user of stuff. And I used to describe my practice when I was primarily a designer and a writer, as having this kind of pivoting one of those like Aaron chairs that went between two tables so I could go words to pictures and pictures to words. And I think now I feel that way about about technology, I, you know, I kind of hate mid journey, because I think the interface looks like it was designed by a 14 year old gamer. And I know that sounds really mean, but I’m just of a generation where I just like the whole sort of talking columns, community stuff. It’s not, it’s not for me. On the other hand, I have, I think, every app for, you know, teenage selfie people. I’m interested in how we edit the face. I’m interested in how we look at the face. I’m interested in what AI does to the face. I’m interested in chat GPT and how the language we use to describe what we think we want is not what we want. And I don’t think I’ve thought about this since this till this second. But when you enter a search in chat GPT, and it brings you something pictorially that you weren’t expecting. It’s sometimes revelatory. And the analogy I want to make for you and your audience is that, if you are doing research in archives, I want to go write a book about, I don’t know, Virginia Woolf and I go to the Burke collection at the New York Public Library, and I ask for something, and I ask for something, and it brings me something into not what I want, but underneath it is something I want, or underneath it is something I think I no one’s ever seen before, and I think it’s a needle in a haystack. Way of working that is, I think that’s why I like it, because you can’t have any expectations. You just cannot dial dial it up to get exactly what you want. You just have to hope that you’re going to get closer. So that is my perspective on technology. I paint assiduously every day so that I become a better painter. I’m much more trusting of my color sense and of my understanding of medium. I paint in oil. I paint big, although the moment I’m painting small because I’m in a smaller studio and a temporary studio. But I’m very agnostic on all of these tools. And
Unknown Speaker 28:04
the only thing that I have not said that I think is extremely important, that we don’t have enough time for it as I’m answering this question, and I know you need to move on, is that the ethics and the complexity of what we’re asking for, naming names, face, swapping those kinds of things, they’re very dicey. And I think the privacy issue is something that I think visual people in their hunger to get up to speed, not not just visual people, tech people. I was at a Cal Tech last month talking to a bunch of people from Dali and a bunch of graduate students who are doing things like PhDs in computational neuroscience and the watch word of their conversation, watch word of the day for them was speed, CPU processing, speed and how fast they could get results. And I think if we take our hunger for speed and our lack of attention to ethics, we’re going to really be in trouble. And it’s a really important conversation that has fueled a lot of my writing in the past decade, and is one I continue to think about. So I spin on this stuff a lot in my studio, between between pixels and pigment, between tech and making. But I think at the end of the day, when the stuff becomes public and when you’re entering search terms that are then going to be appropriated by others. I hesitate to use the word scraped, because it sounds like a biopsy, but, but it is what we’re doing. We’re all scraping each other, and it’s there’s something I think really pernicious about that that needs to be examined more closely. So anyone listening to this who’s working in this territory, I urge you, as I urge myself and my students and everyone I come in contact, but to think about this as citizens of the world, because the consequences of the things we are putting out there and taking are not yet going to be felt, but they will be felt very soon. And I don’t think that any of us think about consequence nearly as much as we should.
Unknown Speaker 29:57
Great. And I think now I’ll plug earlier up.
Unknown Speaker 30:00
Started with Dr Garnet Harris, who’s a Canada Research Chair here in Vancouver, who is just coming out with a book on DIY culture and making and so is kind of tangentially related, I think, to these topics
Unknown Speaker 30:13
we’re having. I’m going to read that book.
Unknown Speaker 30:16
We’re halfway now. So number 10, how do you deal with work, life balance? Not well, how do you deal with it?
Unknown Speaker 30:25
Asymmetry?
Unknown Speaker 30:28
It really depends on the day. I mean, I spent many years with, you know, kids at home and children and dogs and employees, and that’s not right now the issue. But that still doesn’t mean I can’t, you know, realize that it’s been 13 hours that I’ve been working and I haven’t, you know, left my studio. So, I
Unknown Speaker 30:45
mean, I’m pretty organized, and I’m pretty committed to trying to do things for myself every day, like yoga and drinking water and all those things you’re supposed to do. But I think it’s a challenge. It’s really, it’s a challenge when you’re traveling,
Unknown Speaker 30:58
but I think, I think the challenge is something that’s incumbent upon us to pay attention to. And I think the assumption that every day is going to be the same is probably not getting us where we need to go.
Unknown Speaker 31:07
Great. And 11, if you weren’t doing what you do now, what would you be doing?
Unknown Speaker 31:12
I have a different answer for that. Every day of the week,
Unknown Speaker 31:16
what would I be doing if I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now?
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I
Unknown Speaker 31:24
Yeah, you know, it’s a hard question to answer, because it really depends on other people and how you work with other people. I sometimes think it’s place dependent. To come back to your question about place. I think if I were in Europe, I might be doing some different things. I think the pace of life is different there.
Unknown Speaker 31:41
If I was with my children or with living with other people, I might be doing things differently. It’s a very tricky one to answer. I honestly think I’m kind of doing what I want to be doing. I am struggling with how much of my work to share. I’m not a big person on Instagram, I really hesitate to use that modality to advance anything in my creative practice or my my life. I’m I don’t post pictures my kids. I I’m sort of pretty private for someone who has a public life. So
Unknown Speaker 32:17
it’s a very tricky, tricky thing. I am happiest when I am in my studio making things, but then I miss people, so then I have to go out and find people. And so maybe that gets back to work life, work life balance. I’m not sure I’m not answering the last question now, but I think if I weren’t doing what I’m doing, I would be trying to do something that
Unknown Speaker 32:40
that advanced something for someone else. I think I’m not doing enough of that. I’m not giving back enough right now, maybe I am with design observer, but I think,
Unknown Speaker 32:49
I think I would, I would want to be giving back in a different way. I mean, if I was, I think a part of my, part of my answer to that question is like, if I were younger, if I had 20 more years of energy to be a teacher, which I don’t the 20 years I have ahead of me. I would like to be painting. I would be thinking about education in a different way. I would be thinking about access in a different way. I would be thinking about international
Unknown Speaker 33:14
access for students to be able to see the world and be in the world in a different way. I think there’s all kinds of things I would do, but I don’t think that’s actionable, and I think maybe someone else will do that. I hope someone else will do
Unknown Speaker 33:26
that great. And I’m curious for number 12, what would you not like to do with your career?
Unknown Speaker 33:33
I would like not to think that if I don’t have a fancy exhibition record, it means that my painting isn’t have merit.
Unknown Speaker 33:42
There’s a there’s a funny. I you know how, like, um, little kids will come home and say, and bring you a picture and you put it on their fridge. I feel sometimes, even with really good artists on Instagram, it’s like, look what I did. Look what I did. Did you like? What I did? Like? What do you five like? There’s got to be some other pursuit of the making of the work that is interesting to you. I have, I have a friend who’s I have many friends, several friends, well, not many, but enough that I can actually make the statement who go to the studio every day. And it’s not about exhibiting to other people. It’s about the pursuit of the work. It’s about the intellectual inquiry. It’s about the creative engagement. It’s about troubleshooting. It’s about trusting, trusting the landscape. I think,
Unknown Speaker 34:24
I think that’s I would like to be that person, and I’m not sure that I am that person. I think about Louise Bourgeois, who wasn’t showing until she was in her 60s and 70s. And I think maybe showing for me was writing books and having a different kind of life. But I don’t know. I you know, if you’re said this before in an interview, if you’re Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, if you’re if you’re Harrison Ford, doesn’t matter how many movies you make, that’s the music they play when you take the podium, right? So part of this question for me, because I’m, you know, not, I’m not 30 anymore, is like, what’s, what’s the leg?
Unknown Speaker 35:00
See, what’s the work? What’s the future? What am I? What will people remember before? Well, they remember me at all. Does it matter? Do I care? Like, you know, you start to have those questions about what the future holds, and I think the best answer you can have is that you’re doing it for some very internal reason that brings you joy, that brings you intellectual reward, that makes you feel that your time is well spent. That in my case, I would just add one other thing, which is that I feel that sometimes when I’m in the studio, the work I am engaging in is the amalgamation of a lifetime of asking questions. It’s it’s my life as a musician, it’s my life as an actress, it’s my life in France, it’s my life as a parent, it’s my life as a designer. It’s my life as a writer. And so as solitary as it must be to do the work you want to do, you’re also answering some questions that have followed you for many years.
Unknown Speaker 35:51
Perfect. And do you have a favorite word, quote or sentence? And I
Unknown Speaker 35:56
think it might be that deep in corn one I shared with you earlier, but you know, it changes every week.
Unknown Speaker 36:01
You have a least favorite word, quote or sentence?
Unknown Speaker 36:04
Oh, God, I have some words I really hate. All right, I have a whole list. Molly young, the book reviewer for New York Times, and I, for years, have kept a list together. She and I are great. She’s my great young pal. She’s married to someone used to work for me, and
Unknown Speaker 36:21
she calls it garbage language.
Unknown Speaker 36:23
I call it jargon. I hate the word awesome. I think anyone over the age of 12 should use that word.
Unknown Speaker 36:31
I have all kinds of words in business that I don’t like. I don’t like the word takeaway. What is the takeaway? Takeaway is what they call takeout food in London, and it assumes that you have to have gleaned the most cogent, essential, germane idea that has been given to it in the last minute. Instantly. It’s this emphasis on outcomes that I think is an extremely Western way of looking at the world, as opposed to thoughtful, reflective, cogent, like reflecting on something percolating with something
Unknown Speaker 37:02
for those interested, I someday I’ll make a post or a t shirt or something. But I think there’s all kinds of words that we fall prey to that don’t really reveal the best of who we are as humans.
Unknown Speaker 37:14
Okay, and 15, if you had to pick one word to describe yourself, what word would you choose? I
Unknown Speaker 37:23
uh, intellectually
Unknown Speaker 37:27
restless. That’s two words, uh, one word, um, impatient. I wish I wasn’t impatient. I’ve just gotten done answering your last question, saying we have to be reflective. And yet,
Unknown Speaker 37:41
the hunger that I have for the things that interest me, it makes me feel impatient to get to the bottom of them. So I don’t know that’s such a tough you know, when it when it one is finds oneself thinking about other words people would use to describe you, as opposed to how you would describe yourself. That’s a very hard one, impatient. Let’s go with impatient. What keeps you up at night?
Unknown Speaker 38:05
Your last question?
Unknown Speaker 38:13
How I’m going to answer Thomas’s 15th question?
Unknown Speaker 38:18
A lot of things keep you up at night.
Unknown Speaker 38:22
They they are all things that in the light of day never seem quite as worthy as they were in the middle of the night to keep me up anxiety about all kinds of things I can’t control.
Unknown Speaker 38:33
Final stretch here, number 17, what’s a dream you’re chasing
Unknown Speaker 38:40
the illusion that I have any control over anything.
Unknown Speaker 38:45
What inspires you
Unknown Speaker 38:48
my children and their friends and this generation,
Unknown Speaker 38:53
I It is humbling to have kids in their 20s who really have a handle on what matters.
Unknown Speaker 39:03
They do not have unrealistic expectations of themselves or others. They are taking control of their own problems and
Unknown Speaker 39:17
asking, I think, penetrating questions of themselves and others about what the world needs and how they can create a meaningful life in themselves that corresponds to addressing those questions. And I don’t think my generation did that. I don’t think the generation before mine did that. I don’t think the world, at the moment is doing that. And I’m not even sure that I look at my students. I haven’t taught in a couple of years, but I got a little bit of that on my students, but it’s been really interesting watching my children come of age and deal with loss and deal with a planet in peril. And we took our kids to India and Africa when they were 11 and 14, yanked them out of school, spent too much.
Unknown Speaker 40:00
Money, but went on a lot of planes. Had bad carbon footprint for a year, but they saw some stuff. I think it really framed a view of the world that that really now I’m seeing, you know, the it come from to roost. It’s really, it’s that is incredibly inspiring to me. I don’t take any responsibility or credit for any of it. It’s all them, but it’s really fascinating to watch, and it makes me feel hopeful about the future.
Unknown Speaker 40:26
19, any advice you’d like to share, I think I just did.
Unknown Speaker 40:32
And 20, the big one, how do our listeners keep tabs on you? What should we be checking out?
Unknown Speaker 40:37
My website? Jessica hellfan.com has
Unknown Speaker 40:43
it’s a mess because I put up paintings, I take down paintings, I put up paintings. I should be a more after all my years of graphic design, if you think that I would be more organized and bounded, but it is a kind of an organic, evolving place where I put all my work. And so my books are all there. And there are a lot of books you can there are links to reviews of the books. There’s links to other podcast interviews I’ve done.
Unknown Speaker 41:07
That would be the best way. And then for for anyone listening who is particularly interested in design, and in particular, this year, we are looking for donations. We’re looking for volunteers. We’re looking for nominations for
Unknown Speaker 41:22
projects and people who, in the last 20 years have used design in some powerful, transformative, impactful, enduring, sustainable way. That is the purpose of this year for design observer we’re going to the money we’re raising is for a scholarship of some kind. We’ve always really tried to use our community as as our our really our family, to kind of pay attention to what matters to them. And so
Unknown Speaker 41:52
anybody who listens to this can write to me. Design observer Jessica. Design observer, common, tell me what you think and what you want and how you think we can do it better.
Unknown Speaker 42:02
Thank you so much for coming on this show. It’s such a privilege to have you here. Thank you delighted, and thank you very much for your very thoughtful questions. Thanks. Applause.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai