MH: I'm a huge fan of Northern Renaissance interiors... that moment when painters (and paint) got really good and a little secularized, an artists turned their eyes to world around them. And then, reaching forward in time and backward in sentiment, I've been returning to the work of the Pre-Rapahelites over and over, since I was a child. Their sense of color and omnivorous observation of the natural word led to some really hallucinatory looking work sometimes, and they also marked a period when craft, idiosyncratic handmade functional objects, was being considered and celebrated. I spend a lot of time looking at interior design and home-improvement books and blogs, sometimes gleefully but often with a lot of eye-rolling, too. And Minimalism is something I think about quite a lot, both as an ideal, and as something to be fought with and complicated.

MH: There was a clear moment when I was an undergraduate when I realized how much the preparatory drawings for sculptures mattered to my work, the diagrams and blueprints, as it were. More recently blueprints and plans have come to be a real part of the content of my work, too, not just a drawing style. My work is concerned with the way we build things, especially the way amateur builders build, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about the color palettes of lumber yards (all those 2x4s stained red or blue at the end!) and hardware stores (safety colors, neon colors, the nice periwinkle of the chalk used to snap level lines, grays, purples and greens of different grades of drywall). It's exciting to approach those tools and materials with an eye to pleasure as well as practicality.

MH: Things from the hardware store are used to build houses, domestic environments themselves! I'm interested in both of those two worlds, the craft world and the world of construction, and how similar they are except on the level of scale. A wall and a quilt are similarly constructed barriers, with insulation layered in between, and outer surfaces adorned for aesthetics and function (shingles, patchwork). In all cases, I like my materials to be things that most of us know and perhaps can recall touching or using, whether or not we're artists. That sense of possibility amongst common materials is important to me.

MH: There are histories of back-to-the-land and craft movements here in northern California, and back home in northern New England, where I'm from. I grew up in a rural area and spent a lot of time around people who build things: sheds, fences, etc. either as a job or just around their own home or farm. The structures they build, including my parent's own house, have a huge influence on my work and on my way of looking at objects and structures. I find I'm rather more cautious about the transformative possibilities of do-it-yourself activities than some are out here on the west coast. I wasn't hearing the word "utopia" much till I came out here..

MH: When I arrived in California I noticed a real interest in the idea of craft and making physical things as a way to produce transformative experiences, and how these experiences were frequently tied to ideas and images of the natural world. (I remember there was a publication on Californian Utopian communities that came out of CCA while I was applying, with a great essay by Larry Rinder on moving to Ukiah and the idea of a personal Eden.) I think I tend to be more interested in the hiccups, inconsistencies and failings in personal craft and constructions projects, and cautious about typing the language of social experiments to my work. Perhaps, in my case, it's a rather Northern New England sensibility of individualism, which of course has it's own drawbacks. But I think the real critical nugget for me is not in the way these conversations take place in the art world, but in some of the nostalgia for an aestheticized life that I find in home-decor books and blogs while researching materials and processes.

The ideas of "simplifying" and "doing it yourself" are frequently tied to products for consumption... more junk! And of course in such books things aren't usually as messy and full of half-finished projects, arguments and mud as real life is, and frequently the half-finished gesture is what intrigues me most.

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Suzanne Stroebe was born in San Francisco and lived in the Bay Area until moving to Brooklyn in 2007. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2009. Suzanne is a sculptor, installation, and sometimes performance artist. She writes about art for Art Critical and Brooklyn the Borough, and about food for Boiled Jewels.