Materials are the thing I think about most. They're where I feel the work is most alive, and they're the reason I started all of this in the first place. The chance to put my hands on the most fundamental and elemental stuff in existence — to build a life around it, and to offer it to other people — is something I still find hard to believe I get to do.

We name whole epochs of human history after the materials that shaped them. Stone, bronze, iron. Entire millennia remembered by what humans held in their hands, what they hunted with, what they built with, what they wore. I think about that almost every day. The materials we work with carry a weight that nothing invented in the last hundred years can match, because they've been part of the human story since the beginning of it — and in some cases, long before the human story began at all.

Some of them are older than the species that use them. Stone, copper, iron — these come from the planet itself, from a time before anything alive existed to notice them. Others are more miraculous: wool, silk, alpaca, the hardwoods. These only exist because living things made them, and they only exist here. They are not inevitable. They are not universal. They are specific to this particular planet, to this particular arrangement of climate and evolution and deep time, and the fact that we get to work with them at all is something I try very hard not to take for granted.

They've shared space with human beings for centuries. They come from the earth and the living things we share the earth with. They're safe — for your body, for your home, for the world around us.

That's what I want in my life. That's what I work with.