Neal Ulrich Interview
Please tell me a little bit about yourself. What was your trajectory to becoming an artist? How did you settle on your preferred medium(s)? What drew you to traditional craft practice as a medium of expression?
I started making furniture and home goods during my undergraduate studies in product design and manufacturing. I began searching for a way to express my gayness and my queerness in the machine shop, which is traditionally a very hetero-masculine space. Gay culture is often seen by outsiders as flippant and ephemeral and all about surface, so I was particularly interested in producing gay cultural artifacts through the highly technical, methodical process of product design: engineering drawings, computer code, precise cuts and material science. Following the same engineering processes of my heterosexual male classmates, I enjoyed producing complex, flamboyant forms and breaking the rules of “good design” to challenge this notion of surface without substance.
Traditionally, there has been a scholarly binary between fine arts and craft. How do you place yourself on this continuum? How do you define yourself as an artist, artisan, craftsperson, maker, etc.? Are these distinctions meaningful to you and your work or not?
The distinction I make in my work is more between fine arts and design rather than fine arts and craft, though I think design and craft often overlap. I see the difference between fine arts and design as a question of function and utility. In this context, function describes what the creation “does” in a broad sense, while utility describes the creation’s direct usefulness in accomplishing a task. The function of fine art is often to elicit an emotional response from the viewer, to challenge ways of thinking, highlight a cultural dissonance, or advance a philosophical point-of-view. Fine art rarely concerns itself with utility, or it might intentionally subvert utility in order to make a statement. Design, on the other hand, is all about utility: putting a nail in a piece of wood, providing a surface to rest upon, grinding salt, keeping you warm. Good design as it is most often taught is still expected to elicit an emotional response from its user, but this emotional function is often secondary to its utilitarian function.
I tend to call myself a designer more quickly than I would call myself an artist. I like the constraints that utility places on the visual expression of a work. And as a gay designer, I hope to work against cultural stereotypes that gay men are all about style and lack the ability to create something of utility. But I’m definitely not running away from style--I love my work to be a little over-the-top, glamorous, and fun. For example, the Priss Stool provides the structure for a backrest, but intentionally leaves it out; the back and legs become a purely aesthetic treatment and reference the high back of a throne in stool form.
Who are your influences? Who are the other artists or individuals your work is in conversation with?
I’m actually really influenced by drag, and the over-the-top exaggerations of femininity and the human condition that queens perform. Over-exaggeration and humor are really effective tools of communication that drag queens use really well to highlight our cultural biases and prejudices. My bachelor’s thesis was titled “Designer Drag,” and looked at how drag methodologies like camp, artifice, and exaggeration could be used in product design to express a queer aesthetic. Drag queens use these methodologies to create fantasy personas and safe spaces where they can express a fully-realized, diva persona. Similarly, my product design is intended to bring delight and swagger to people’s homes and lives, and help them construct their own fantasy spaces. [http://www.nealulrich.com/queen-mum.html]
Your work focuses strongly on queer interpretations of experiences of sexuality and gender. Was this always a facet of your work? How did it evolve?
My work has always been influenced by my life as a gay man, though it has not always been as explicitly about queerness as it was in my thesis. I was bullied pretty relentlessly during grade school for being feminine and weird, which has helped me develop empathy for others who might also be marginalized or are struggling. I’m really interested in hospital and healthcare design because I think our sick and disabled are often forgotten about, even in the design of hospitals that are supposed to be places of healing. A few years ago I designed Inspirator, a luxury pill bottle of walnut and brass to replace the clinical, obtrusive orange pill bottle that has turned into a symbol of shame and stigma. Pill-taking is not a specifically queer experience, but my experiences as a gay person has allowed me to reinterpret the ritual in a more human-centered, compassionate, and queer way. These design choices can have a real impact on the people using a product, though I don’t think that impact always needs to feel explicitly queer. I want people to feel special, empowered, valued, and designed for.
Have you found your work informed by or in tension with the traditional gendered associations or history of your medium? What were the moments in your life that influenced this perspective?
As I mentioned above, the machine shop, foundry, and woodshop I worked out of during school was a fairly hetero-masculine space. And while gay people are easily associated with interior design, fashion design, make-up and hair, gay product designers are not really in the cultural imaginary. My colleagues always expected me to come up with rainbows, unicorns, and sex toys when I talked about designing queer products. It’s been fun to develop work that is decidedly none of those things, and have conversations with them afterwards about how I still consider my work to be very influenced by gender and sexuality. There are also a lot of gender stereotypes in design--just look at a man’s razor versus a woman’s at the drug store. These design elements of hard/soft, dark/light, angular/curvaceous are things I like to play with in subverting and rearranging these stereotypes to call attention to them.
What is the environment and audience you create your pieces for? Is it a domestic space, a museum space or…?
John Waters says his most subversive film was Hairspray, not because it was necessarily the most queer, but because it touched the most people. That’s exactly the perspective I take with my own work. I love designing for the everyday because it has the potential to get inside people’s homes and work, become a part of their life, and really change someone’s ways of thinking and doing. I want my work in desk drawers and on bedside tables, on the street or in the hands of a doctor, not hanging on the wall in a museum.
The last decade has brought significant societal and political change for the LGBTQ community with the advancements in marriage equality, but there are still important advancements to be made. Have you found your work addressing or evolving in light of these the social and political changes? What do you see as the new front-line for the LGBTQ community and do you intend to address it in your work?
I’m fortunate enough to get to stand on the shoulders of giants and appreciate a lot of rights and freedoms because generations before me have put their lives on the line. There is still a lot to be done, and I hope my generation and people after me don’t become complacent. Speaking openly about my gay life and my queer design influences is important to keep that conversation going and is something I even bring up in job interviews. I hope to use the place of privilege I enjoy as a platform to now lift up others, through design that accounts for people of all genders, races, classes and abilities.
I started making furniture and home goods during my undergraduate studies in product design and manufacturing. I began searching for a way to express my gayness and my queerness in the machine shop, which is traditionally a very hetero-masculine space. Gay culture is often seen by outsiders as flippant and ephemeral and all about surface, so I was particularly interested in producing gay cultural artifacts through the highly technical, methodical process of product design: engineering drawings, computer code, precise cuts and material science. Following the same engineering processes of my heterosexual male classmates, I enjoyed producing complex, flamboyant forms and breaking the rules of “good design” to challenge this notion of surface without substance.
Traditionally, there has been a scholarly binary between fine arts and craft. How do you place yourself on this continuum? How do you define yourself as an artist, artisan, craftsperson, maker, etc.? Are these distinctions meaningful to you and your work or not?
The distinction I make in my work is more between fine arts and design rather than fine arts and craft, though I think design and craft often overlap. I see the difference between fine arts and design as a question of function and utility. In this context, function describes what the creation “does” in a broad sense, while utility describes the creation’s direct usefulness in accomplishing a task. The function of fine art is often to elicit an emotional response from the viewer, to challenge ways of thinking, highlight a cultural dissonance, or advance a philosophical point-of-view. Fine art rarely concerns itself with utility, or it might intentionally subvert utility in order to make a statement. Design, on the other hand, is all about utility: putting a nail in a piece of wood, providing a surface to rest upon, grinding salt, keeping you warm. Good design as it is most often taught is still expected to elicit an emotional response from its user, but this emotional function is often secondary to its utilitarian function.
I tend to call myself a designer more quickly than I would call myself an artist. I like the constraints that utility places on the visual expression of a work. And as a gay designer, I hope to work against cultural stereotypes that gay men are all about style and lack the ability to create something of utility. But I’m definitely not running away from style--I love my work to be a little over-the-top, glamorous, and fun. For example, the Priss Stool provides the structure for a backrest, but intentionally leaves it out; the back and legs become a purely aesthetic treatment and reference the high back of a throne in stool form.
Who are your influences? Who are the other artists or individuals your work is in conversation with?
I’m actually really influenced by drag, and the over-the-top exaggerations of femininity and the human condition that queens perform. Over-exaggeration and humor are really effective tools of communication that drag queens use really well to highlight our cultural biases and prejudices. My bachelor’s thesis was titled “Designer Drag,” and looked at how drag methodologies like camp, artifice, and exaggeration could be used in product design to express a queer aesthetic. Drag queens use these methodologies to create fantasy personas and safe spaces where they can express a fully-realized, diva persona. Similarly, my product design is intended to bring delight and swagger to people’s homes and lives, and help them construct their own fantasy spaces. [http://www.nealulrich.com/queen-mum.html]
Your work focuses strongly on queer interpretations of experiences of sexuality and gender. Was this always a facet of your work? How did it evolve?
My work has always been influenced by my life as a gay man, though it has not always been as explicitly about queerness as it was in my thesis. I was bullied pretty relentlessly during grade school for being feminine and weird, which has helped me develop empathy for others who might also be marginalized or are struggling. I’m really interested in hospital and healthcare design because I think our sick and disabled are often forgotten about, even in the design of hospitals that are supposed to be places of healing. A few years ago I designed Inspirator, a luxury pill bottle of walnut and brass to replace the clinical, obtrusive orange pill bottle that has turned into a symbol of shame and stigma. Pill-taking is not a specifically queer experience, but my experiences as a gay person has allowed me to reinterpret the ritual in a more human-centered, compassionate, and queer way. These design choices can have a real impact on the people using a product, though I don’t think that impact always needs to feel explicitly queer. I want people to feel special, empowered, valued, and designed for.
Have you found your work informed by or in tension with the traditional gendered associations or history of your medium? What were the moments in your life that influenced this perspective?
As I mentioned above, the machine shop, foundry, and woodshop I worked out of during school was a fairly hetero-masculine space. And while gay people are easily associated with interior design, fashion design, make-up and hair, gay product designers are not really in the cultural imaginary. My colleagues always expected me to come up with rainbows, unicorns, and sex toys when I talked about designing queer products. It’s been fun to develop work that is decidedly none of those things, and have conversations with them afterwards about how I still consider my work to be very influenced by gender and sexuality. There are also a lot of gender stereotypes in design--just look at a man’s razor versus a woman’s at the drug store. These design elements of hard/soft, dark/light, angular/curvaceous are things I like to play with in subverting and rearranging these stereotypes to call attention to them.
What is the environment and audience you create your pieces for? Is it a domestic space, a museum space or…?
John Waters says his most subversive film was Hairspray, not because it was necessarily the most queer, but because it touched the most people. That’s exactly the perspective I take with my own work. I love designing for the everyday because it has the potential to get inside people’s homes and work, become a part of their life, and really change someone’s ways of thinking and doing. I want my work in desk drawers and on bedside tables, on the street or in the hands of a doctor, not hanging on the wall in a museum.
The last decade has brought significant societal and political change for the LGBTQ community with the advancements in marriage equality, but there are still important advancements to be made. Have you found your work addressing or evolving in light of these the social and political changes? What do you see as the new front-line for the LGBTQ community and do you intend to address it in your work?
I’m fortunate enough to get to stand on the shoulders of giants and appreciate a lot of rights and freedoms because generations before me have put their lives on the line. There is still a lot to be done, and I hope my generation and people after me don’t become complacent. Speaking openly about my gay life and my queer design influences is important to keep that conversation going and is something I even bring up in job interviews. I hope to use the place of privilege I enjoy as a platform to now lift up others, through design that accounts for people of all genders, races, classes and abilities.