Dream / Reality Reality / Dream
The other night, I was watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and a conversation between Erika Jayne and her therapist really struck me. While she was dealing with the trauma of an abusive ex-partner and a looming lawsuit, she expressed a hope for the day when all the pain and stress would be over. Her therapist explained that the day when the laundry is folded, the bills are paid, and there is no more stress will never come. That is life. I think for so many of us, life is what happens while we are busy making other plans. Yes, that was a John Lennon and Erika Jayne reference in one paragraph.
A few months ago, I wrote about the idea of romance as a way to move through our lives. It centered on finding simple pleasures in our daily routines and embedding our rituals with a little romance. For me, that is eating a daily blueberry muffin and drinking coffee from my favourite cup. In this way, we can move through life with less focus on the future or the past and celebrate the present moment more.
With social media and AI, it is all too easy to live much of our reality in an online dream state, a kind of purgatory of thousands of Instagram reels showing welding and fabrication ASMR. That is what everyone gets from their algorithm, no? When I am in this state of scrolling, I am partly a person in physical space, but also a person existing within an app that has no real reality.
I recently had the pleasure of traveling to Madrid to celebrate a sculpture we made for the electric car brand CUPRA. While I was there, I visited the Reina Sofía museum to see some incredible paintings by Dalí, Picasso, and Miró. Walking through the museum was a spiritual experience for me. Being so close to work that I idolise for its ability to completely transport you from reality to the world of the artist was deeply emotional. The Surrealists took a dark reality and twisted it into paintings that resembled dreams. They allow us to escape and imagine.
When digital non-reality becomes the normal state for many people, I am thinking about ChatGPT girlfriends and parasocial relationships with celebrities we will never meet, dreaming becomes redundant. We do not need to dream if our dreams are provided for us. If I suddenly develop a love for Bad Bunny, I can immediately watch thousands of videos of him performing, doing interviews, and eating very spicy chicken wings. There is no need for me to imagine what he is like; I can see it and consume it.
Although I was not alive to experience it, it feels like in the time of the Surrealists, the design world was about predicting and shaping the future. I generally dislike the work of Le Corbusier, but even I have to admit he had vision. Now, it seems there is little ambition to dream of a better future. Perhaps we have lost our ability to dream.
When I started working on a new body of work, which will be released slowly over the next few months, I wanted to build physical dreams. I think that if our physical reality were more free and less bound by expectation and fear, perhaps we could rely less on the escape that living in digital dreamland provides. In my mind, the home should be less about fabric clashes and paint colours and more about emotional durability and self-expression.
The collection I am putting together will be less of a collection and more of a chapter of work, as broad and far-reaching as possible. I am creating objects from a bed to a toilet roll holder and everything in between. The idea is that whatever your space is currently like, you can find the right piece to bring a physical dream into your reality.
Life is too short and too uncertain to live outside of reality or within someone else’s expectations of your reality.
Real Romance Is Making a Comeback
In 2026, the world feels lost. I think we all know and understand where I am coming from with that statement. I think all I can do in a lost world is talk about objects, furniture, design, and art, and offer them as ways of reframing our reality.
In order to deal with our lost world, I would like to propose a new way of existing: a life lived through romance. The concept of romance I am suggesting is not that of romantic relationships or sex. Instead, I propose that we should look at life itself through romance.
Romance can be a lifestyle, a character trait, and an escape from brutal reality.
Romance is complex and irrational, yet it is equally visceral, emotional, and powerful. When the structures and systems of the world begin to crumble, we need to find ways to dream, to escape, and to make sense of the incomprehensible. Our lives are now filled with instability and incoherence. Instead of imposing more rigidity on our lives and expressions, perhaps a more peaceful existence can be attained by embracing imperfection and recognising its beauty.
In Cameron Winter’s music video for the song “Love Takes Miles” (yes, I do know who Geese are, and yes, I do think they are snake charmers for young white males), there is a construction worker running and dancing, and it is all filmed on an iPhone. What this video is trying to capture is the romantic escape that a good song can provide, no matter what your lived reality is. With so much media pushed onto us about excessive and luxurious lives, it is refreshing to see an average person jubilant and free.
The video reminds me a lot of Zella Day’s “You Sexy Thing” video, which is an equally, if not more, jubilant expression of the mundane. In my mind, romanticising our lives and our environments, and living for what we already have, is a powerful tool of resistance against a world filled with pressure for more.
Living with romance, to me, is about allowing yourself to make your reality a dream, rather than relentlessly pursuing the idea of turning dreams into reality. In practical terms, this could be something as simple as taking the bus rather than the tube to work, even if it takes longer, even if you arrive slightly later, because it brings you more joy.
In our interior spaces, this means refusing to design a room based on a consensus of what is considered “good,” or forcing objects and furniture into a cohesive match. Instead, it means putting together a mix of pieces that make you feel warm and at home in the way the right collectible object does.
I was reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron again the other day, and it talks about a fulfilled life being made up of a thousand small tweaks in the right direction. I think applying a rosy filter, in whatever small way we can, to our daily lives is one of the only ways of dealing with a collapsing society. In my life, this means a daily blueberry muffin. No matter how hard I know the day ahead will be, I am going to enjoy that muffin.
I am currently working on a design for a bed, and the concept I have is this: if a bed stops being merely a place to sleep and becomes an object that is a dream in itself, what does that do to our relationship with sleep? Can it transform our dreams into reality, or at least blur the line between the two?
I think objects and design have the power to tweak our reality. By making work that feels dreamlike, I believe we are able to live more closely to how we dream.
Random Towers and Living Room Decoration
I was interviewed a few weeks ago for a digital publication, and one of the questions the interviewer asked me referenced a trip I’d talked about previously to Villa André Bloc. Villa André Bloc was a house with a large garden in Paris where Bloc had built these inhabitable sculptures. I was in awe of the scale and randomness of the work. It really did feel like he’d woken up one morning and just decided to make something quite random, and it had gotten a bit out of control.
I immediately fell in love with the illogical human spirit that the structures contained. I think that when the systems of the world begin to crumble, we need to find ways to dream, to escape, and to make sense of the incomprehensible. Our lives are now filled with instability and incoherence. Instead of imposing more rigidity on our lives and expressions, perhaps a more peaceful existence can be attained by embracing imperfection and the irrational and recognising their beauty.
At a completely different scale to Bloc, I recently made an Amphora. It’s now just sitting in our workshop office, with no real rhyme or reason for existing other than that I woke up one morning and felt like it needed to. I think doing things for a purely expressive purpose is, in many ways, a form of soft resistance against an intensely capitalistic society. Everything in today’s world is supposed to have a purpose and a financial goal. We live in a data- and results-driven culture: posts with friends are measured in likes, art is only talked about if it sells for lots of money, and music is all about YouTube views and monthly Spotify listeners.
To create something with no real ambition beyond doing it for the love of it feels quietly subversive.
I don’t think Villa André Bloc is open to visitors regularly, but if you can go and see it at some point, I look back on that visit as a real turning point in my artistic development - so I would highly recommend it!
In the same interview I mentioned above, I talked a bit about Ron Arad and my preference for his early work. I wanted to take the space here to elaborate a bit on those thoughts.
When I returned to metalwork after a short romance with timber, I was at the Royal College of Art. Amongst the exceptionally talented and experienced technical staff in the metalwork department, one of the team members had been one of Ron’s previous fabricators. He talked about the way they worked, and it sounded so dynamic, sculptural, and expressive.
I fell in love with works like the Big Easy because, similarly to the André Bloc tower, it had so much indescribable energy and life inside it that you immediately forgot it was probably the worst armchair to sit in - possibly ever. This technician would talk about how they would bash and kick the steel into place, and out would emerge this dramatic and charming chair.
Ron then began to outsource his fabrication, and the works seemed to take on a higher and higher level of polish and shine. In my mind, they lost the human energy and spirit that had been so engaging and inspiring in the early work. They changed from energetic works of art into decoration for large living rooms.
As I said in this interview: imperfection is what makes us human. It’s not interesting to me in the slightest to make something perfectly — it’s much more interesting to make something with the scars of its construction, where feeling trumps finish.
It’s like listening to Charli XCX’s Brat or the new Taylor Swift album (I love both, by the way). Charli’s is scrappy, raw, and honest. Taylor’s is decoration to the ears — polished and catchy. Both have their place, but I’d rather make work like Charli.
As always, send me an email if you have any questions or want to come and visit our workshop!
All the love,
Joe
'Balancing Act'
Balancing Act is a collection of two lamps and a candle holder. Inspired by Calder’s Circus, it captures a sense of naive joy and playful freedom, inviting interaction and spontaneity through balanced forms and whimsical design.
This mini collection marks a pivotal moment for Six Dots . it’s the first collection made from a material other than aluminium. It was created to challenge us and push us further, testing our capabilities as a team and as makers.
The pieces were conceived over the summer, when I developed a fascination with the playful work of Alexander Calder. While his work varied in scale, his ability to make hard, industrial materials feel light and playful resonated with me as a designer who has always strived to make metal feel warm, tactile, and safe.
Each piece has its own ambiguous character: the candle holder was initially nicknamed the Squirrel, the table lamp reminded me of a child offering a gift, and the floor lamp evoked a person gazing at something precious.
‘A Folly Through the Trees’
The environment we live in today is increasingly untethered. Good is presented as evil, and evil as good; lawless leaders prevail, and uncanny fake realities surround us. The future is uncertain, the present is troubled, and the past is not what we once believed. How do we create a foundation for our existence without a pillar to lean on?
The digital and the real are becoming increasingly blurred. The work in this show seeks to offer an escape from our untethered reality into a tangible fantasy. It is a rejection of the unreal—grounded instead in purely human, authentic fantasy.
The show is conceived as a diorama: a landscape constructed from sculpture and functional objects. A broken fence, a standing tree, and a folly in a clearing are just a few of the elements used to create an abstraction of the artist’s own imagined perfect place.
Six Dots Design presents an immersive show of sculpture and objects designed to pull us out of our uncanny lives and into a real fantasy.
Private View on the 17th Septemeber
18:00pm to 23:45pm
Location: 30 Hancock Road, London, E33DA, UK
