Ep. 203: Coil + Drift’s John Sorensen-Jolink on Movement as a Medium

Nov 14

Lighting Designer John Sorensen-Jolink grew up in Portland, filling his days with soccer, youth symphony, horseback riding, and taking cabs between schools to train for a future as a pro dancer. After 10 years of performing with the best of the best (think Twyla Tharp et al) he answered an urge to learn how to design and make objects grounded in human connection. Now Coil + Drift is celebrated for its material forward honesty and graceful gesture with light and space. I guess you can take the designer out of dance, but you can’t take the dancer out of the design.

Learn more about John at his website or on instagram.

Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to John Sorensen-Jolink. These days John is a lighting designer and founder of design studio Coil & Drift. But in his previous career he was a professional contemporary dancer. He earned his BFA at the conservatory at New York University’s Tisch School and went on to perform with legendary choreographers and directors such as Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs, Doug Elkins, and Twyla Tharp. After spending 10 years as a dancer, largely on the road touring with productions, and living out of a suitcase, John began to crave something a bit more tangible and rooted. Learning to design and make objects was a natural extension of his creative practice and quickly became a new passion. He founded Coil & Drift in 2016 and has been garnering attention and accolades ever since, including the ICFF Editors’ Award for best New Designer in 2016, and inclusion on Sight Unseen’s 2018 American Design Hot List. In 2022 Coil & Drift relocated from Brooklyn to the majestic Catskill Mountains, and opened a new studio, showroom, & facility where they now produce everything in-house. His dancer’s sensibility comes through in the work itself - as it manages to capture the grace and movement of light and air while simultaneously conveying an honest earth-bound materiality. Talking to John, I’m struck by just how balanced and grounded he is. Maybe this is exactly the reason he’s been able to soar (both literally and figuratively) through a wild and adventurous life, and never lose his center… Here’s John.
John Sorensen-Jolink: I’m John Sorensen-Jolink and I am in Jeffersonville, New York, which is in the Western Catskills. I’m a lighting designer for Coil + Drift, which is my company. Wee design lighting grounded in human connection and what that means to me is that this obsession with home that I’ve had for a long time is really just about how objects can influence and energize the spaces that we would have it. And maybe even us. And like how that can influence how we relate to each other.
Amy: I love that! That is right up my alley, so I can’t wait to get into that. But in order to understand how you got obsessed with this, I need to know what you were like as a kid. So let’s go all the way back to Portland, Oregon, and tell me about your childhood, your family dynamic and the things that captured your imagination?
John: Okay, I grew up in Portland, before Portland was cool, I guess. Although I thought it was pretty cool. Yeah, I was a kid who did… I was obsessed with doing everything. I wanted to try everything. I think my parents encouraged me to try everything. Maybe as a reaction to having very focused, strict upbringings themselves. They were really down with me, like doing a lot of different things.
Amy: Okay, clarifying question. Siblings?
John: I have one sister. I’m the youngest, she’s four years older than I am.
Amy: And were they down with her doing everything too?
John: Yeah, yeah, definitely, although we’re very different, so our interests were very different. I mean she was like a reader, just devoured books. And so before I knew how to read, I thought it was just something that she did when she wasn’t playing with me. (Laughs) I remember my parents had to work really hard to get me into reading and finally it worked. But yeah, we were both very different.
Amy: Four years older, you said your parents had pretty rigid upbringings, how would you characterize that, just a different generation or was there…
John: I think just a different generation, yeah. What was expected of them was that they would have one career and it was probably a couple of options. And especially for my mom, as many women, there maybe wasn’t so much of a career focus and she really did something that I see now as very rebellious, which was that she went to university and she (laughs) ran away from Portland and became a Pan Am flight attendant, and then a purser. She was one of the bosses for the hiring of the whole Western hemisphere for Pan Am. So she’s been to every country in the world, she speaks multiple languages. And then ended up ultimately Pan Am put her through law school.
Amy: Damn! That’s quite a role model. (Laughs0
John: Yeah, right? None of which I think was in her parent’s plan. I can’t speak for them, but I imagine they did not have that in mind for her. (Laughs)
Amy: Okay, I love that you got to see that. It also sounds like there is a wild streak that we’re going to have to discuss somewhere. (Laughter)
John: Totally! Totally, there’s this feeling of like try everything. It comes really from both of them, my dad was also adventurous. They met in law school in Oregon and my dad left Minnesota where he grew up in a tiny little town and had been accepted to a couple of schools and left in his car to drive from one to the other and decide where he was going to live. [0.05.00]
Amy: Wow.
John: That was how he chose and he got to Oregon and it was like just so beautiful, the landscape outside of Portland. You have a mountain an hour away. You have the ocean an hour away. You have the desert an hour away, it’s just like rain forest, it’s absolutely spectacular landscape and he just couldn’t go anywhere else. So that’s how he ended up in Oregon.
Amy: I like this adventurous spirit and wild streak that’s turning up. But it starts off with you, at least, with a willingness to let you try everything and find maybe what was interesting to you. And as a kid what were those things? Where were you going?
John: Yeah, so I was like a very serious violinist.
Amy: From what age did you pick up the violin?
John: Like four. That was very early.
Amy: Did they have a tiny violin?
John: Oh yes! (Laughter) Many of them, because I think you rent them when you’re that little because you need a new one… I’m very tall, so I was just growing like crazy, many, many cute little violins. (Laughs)
Amy: But from four years old you had a kind of seriousness about it?
John: Yeah, I studied privately and played in a youth symphony in Portland and yeah, I was very serious and I could have continued to do that as a profession, but music is very much a part of my childhood and my family, so I think at that point I just was enjoying it, had no intention to do it as a career.
Amy: You didn’t have that figured out at four years old?
John: No. (Laughs) Nor did I at 10 or 12, I was just like…
Amy: That’s fair.
John: Into it and I think back now, what was the most challenging thing for me about studying music was how much time alone, which was a lot for me as a kid to do. I wanted to be around other people. So I think eventually that was… I was also drawn to sports, I played soccer and that kind of gave me the group fix that I craved.
Amy: Oh good, and was it a close family? Did you feel…
John: Yeah, we had some struggles with mental health growing up. I think like a lot of families there were some struggles from really the past, if I’m honest, that meant that we were probably closer than many families because we kind of needed to be. Yeah, so my sister and I are very close. I know I started out by saying we’re very different, but we’re also very, very close. And I also have been very close with my parents and continue to be.
Amy: Yeah. So I’m seeing a kid who is serious about violin, but also playing soccer, close with his sister and supported in finding whatever your curiosity is leading you towards. There’s this moment in childhood where you start to sort of feel impending adulthood. And sometimes it happens early adolescence, sometimes you stave it off as long as you can. Where are you on that spectrum?
John: I think it happened when I found dance, which ultimately became my first career. That was when I was 12, I was at a public school and a middle school and we were given the option to not take physical education classes if we took a dance class at the school instead. And so I thought that would be fun and I tried it and totally loved it. But just because it was fun, but then at the end of the year the teacher, there were two teachers that came to me and said, we’re actually part of a feeder program with this performing arts high school that’s public and we think you should go there, but we think you should go in your eighth grade year when you’re still in middle school. And so I was like, what? (Laughs)
I was like okay. So my eighth grade year… yeah, I fell deep into dance very quickly. But my eighth grade year I would go to academics at my middle school in the morning and then I would… my parents would call a cab because they both worked and drive me from one side of the city to the other side of the city to the afternoon where I would dance all afternoon. And that was my first year, I had no idea what I was doing, but I just loved dancing.
Amy: Okay, I have so many questions. First of all, did it feel good to be singled out like this and did it click for you that you were excelling in something so much so that teachers took notice and started to advise you on maybe how you could accelerate?
John: Yeah, I don’t know, but when you say did it click to be singled out, I think that was part of it at that age. I think that felt really good to me at that time, to be this kid that had done a lot of things well, but I think maybe because I was doing so many of them, it wouldn’t happen often that someone would say, oh my god, that was so amazing. It would happen often that… but I think it was one of the first times someone had said like, this is just natural for you to be a dancer, you should do this. And I was like, wow. And I think I just totally went with it, it felt right at the time.
Amy: Okay, I love this already. I also need to know, at some point horses started featuring prominently in your life, can you tell me about that?
John: Yeah, (laughter) thank you for asking because they’re a big part of my life. No, this was the whole time…
Amy: The whole time, okay.
John: Yeah, this was part of the beginning of very, very young experiences with horses and then it just continued first by me going to summer camp for horses, for riding when I was very young, maybe like six or seven. And then I started working at that camp and then I started working at the ranch that this camp was on. And this place still exists today. It’s a beautiful organization, they have like 8,000 acres of land in a land trust in South Eastern Washington. And they’re doing amazing work. People that I worked with who as kids at this ranch now run the place and I was just completely… there’s no other way to describe it, but that I was horse crazy, I just loved them. I loved the inexperience. It makes a lot of sense from a dance perspective because it’s all about maintaining your plum line, which we talk about the vertical line through your spine of gravity. And horses, riding a horse, if you’re going to stay on, is about balance and experiencing that plum line, and extended through the horse as well. And dance is a lot about that as well, so. And then I really did stop riding, I think, maybe mid high school until last year. It was a combination of it just being like the amount of time that was required to train to be a dancer, my summers were suddenly taken by intensives that I would attend for the whole summer. You’re expected to just keep training for the whole summer and not take time off.
Amy: Yeah, it sounds a little bit like training for the Olympics or something.
John: A little bit. Yeah, I think so. There’s a lot about dance that’s athletic and being an athlete and yet dancers also hate being called athletes because there’s so much of a creative element involved. But yeah, it’s definitely a combination of art and athleticism.
Amy: As you’re getting better and better at dance and probably finding your creative voice within it, is this also your primary social scene?
John: Totally. And this is the thing that drew me in more than anything, except the actual experience of moving and performing. I loved this community and we had…this community of kids studying dance seriously. It was a pre-professional company that they created at the school, so you really felt like you were in a dance company, even though you weren’t being paid. We would go around Portland and sometimes go on tour as well, and perform in this ‘dance company.’ It existed since like the early 70s, it’s a Portland institution. So I knew when I was told that I should go study at the school that that’s where this company was. It was very prestigious, so I was excited. But yeah, totally, we probably were like 20 kids and we were super-super close. The other thing I should mention about this school is that it’s 98% black. So I was…
Amy: That is important.
John: And I’m a six foot two white person (laughs), so I was very much aware that I stuck out from a young age and yeah, but also immersed in a group of people that became my family and it just happened that a lot of them didn’t look like me. But that didn’t matter. We were required to study African dance as well as tap and jazz and ballet and modern dance. So it was a very well-rounded program, but I always… I could show you some great images of African dance costumes on me. (Laughs) It was pretty fabulous.
Amy: That sounds like a really magical experience and it does… I mean it is so important when you’re that age to get a kind of recognition and to find, to grab onto something that you’re truly good at, that you enjoy. And I want to get to… you went to NYU to Tisch School and got a BFA and excelled there as well. Was there any teen angst or rebellion or awkwardness that you had to sort of fit into in terms of making the transition?
John: Totally, so I left high school a year early, when I was 17 and went to [0.25.00] New York. Immediately terribly homesick and…
Amy: It’s a big change.
John: Yeah and very, very quickly after a month, like found the dance department was going to be my family. Honestly, I don’t know how kids go to NYU for general studies and find a community. It’s like there is no campus, you’re thrown into the city and it’s wild. But the dance department was a small group of people and that was immediately my home. But actually I was reading some things that I had written at that time, recently, and I hated the dance department after the first year. I wanted to leave. And I’m not so sure that I really hated it, but I certainly did not think it was the right place for me. I applied to a couple of other schools in Europe and I was ready to go to one of them, and, I think that was about ego and when you talk about rebelliousness, I remember… I just seemed so young at that time. I remember just thinking these people have no idea. Like I am going to be on Broadway, you know? (Laughter) That’s what I thought my goal was. It totally wasn’t by the end of school, but that was my, going out of high school, I was like yeah, I can be in Cats, that would be succeeding, what really exists for most people are project based contracts. So you will work with a choreographer who is maybe super cutting edge, doing really interesting work. And still they don’t have enough money to have a full time dance company. That’s like quite a huge budget to pay people and so they end up hiring you for three months and it culminates in a show or maybe a tour and then you’re onto the next job. So one of my biggest… and to this day, criticism of NYU was that it really prepared us for a life as a fulltime company dancer, which again, this exists, but it’s a very small percentage and most dancers, it doesn’t matter your expertise or how good or famous you are, are doing project based work. Thankfully I had a lot of full time work when I was dancing…
Amy: Tell me about that, I don’t know what it’s like to dance, like go on tours as a dancer…
John: Yeah, well I danced with probably 20 different choreographers and companies over 10 years.
Amy: Some of the big ones too?
John: Yeah, big ones. (Laughs) I danced for Twyla Tharp, who is one of the foremost living postmodern dance choreographers and is known for moving modern dance and ballet into the same world. I danced in the show called Sleep No More, which still exists in New York City. I was in the original cast. I danced with Lucinda Childs [0.30.00] and Robert Wilson, which Lucinda Childs also one of the founding mavins of post-modern dance, still alive. And for me the thing that I loved that kept me going was performing. I loved being on stage and I loved the camaraderie of being on stage with other people and presenting this work. Still to this day, there is nothing like it.
Amy: I’m picturing a very itinerant kind of way of life.
John: Yeah, even without the bus, the life of a dancer is you’re moving a lot, you’re touring, you’re flying on planes, you’re traveling.
Amy: I’m super interested, I know, I can see your dance creative process and probably even the movement of your plum line and horses in your, now your objects, your lighting and furniture. But how would you describe your creative process as a dancer? There’s a lot of practice, there’s a lot of training, but if we were to get really into the poetics of what it is you were good at and you felt like you were expressing, what was that?
John: I think there’s a couple of answers because I worked for… each choreographer is expecting something different and it’s about their process as well. But what I was really drawn to was… when we were given the opportunity to live within a role and create a world within that role, and then at the same time, when we were also given feedback and structure within that experience, that was kind of the sweet spot. So sometimes you would walk into a room and you’d be given choreography and it was like, you must do exactly this, and that’s its own challenge. But not so amazing. And sometimes you go into a studio with a choreographer and they say, “I’m going to improvise and I want you to learn my improvisation on the spot.” And then you improvise and you learn your improvisation and then we’ll make a dance. Then you go to the first performance and you see the program and none of the dancers are accredited, even though most of the movement was made up by the dancers. And that’s common. And so again, I think the sweet spot is a little bit of both, and this is the same for me in design, like I love having structure and parameters given to me and then to be creative within that. I think for me Sleep No More was like the ultimate world because we were really doing a lot of creation when we were making the show. It’s a very unique show that happens in a six story building and the audience moves through the building following the performers who are all dancers, as we dance the story of Macbeth. So it’s a very specific show and really beautiful, also can be kind of terrifying. But we created a lot of that movement and yet the two directors are very good at giving feedback, shaping, structuring and making you feel like your decisions are valid, or they need to change, this isn’t working. So that was, for me, I think one of the most beautiful processes, creatively.
Amy: So 10 years of that lifestyle sounds both really formative, really magical, also very difficult, can erode at you a bit if you’re living out of a suitcase and have a lot of short term relationships. At some point you decide that you need something less ephemeral and more tangible. Can you talk to me about that reconciliation within yourself and what you chose to do about it?
John: Totally. I think it was like 2011. I was in the dressing room in Sleep No More and I was looking around and thinking, god, these artists that I’m performing with are all so incredible, some of them are 10 years older than I am. We’re at the top of our game, like Beyonce is coming to see the show, it was very hot when it first opened. We were all feeling really great and I thought to myself, I think I want something else. And I think it takes being at that place sometimes to be like, hmm, yeah, it’s super fulfilling and I think I want something else. And I think I wanted something more in multiple ways. One was financially, we were all paid the same rate in Sleep No More and I just saw myself in 10 years and I knew that I had more ambitions and wanted to be able to own a home and those things. And it wasn’t going to happen if I was going to continue to be the kind of dancer that I was.
So something needed to change. And at the same time I was always… it was bubbling up at that moment, curious about running my own company. I wanted to start something and make something and I remember thinking maybe it’s a dance company, maybe it’s a choreographic practice where I’m working as a choreographer. But slowly over the course of like three years I found myself in a woodworking class because I wanted to use my hands to make something. I had this idea that dance was so ephemeral and I wanted to, like you said, kind of hold something that I made. And that’s not something that was new. I was obsessed with making things when I was little. I would build epic treehouses, I remember we had like five of them, 30 feet in the air in my backyard, which was quite large in Oregon. It wasn’t new. I wanted to go back, if I’m honest, to this tangible practice. And dive more deeply into it. I didn’t know that that would be a career, but I started taking some woodworking classes and just fell deeply in love with the practice of making things.
Amy: You have a pattern of trying new things and being really good at it. Please tell me about a failure, please. (Laughs)
John: Thank you, that’s very kind of you. I have plenty of failures. (Laughter) I could tell you about being fired from jobs; yeah, no, I wasn’t amazing at everything, that’s for sure. But no, if I’m honest, I’m not an amazing woodworker. I was more excited about exploring that. And I never went as deep as I could have gone to really be like a craftsperson in wood. I was too excited about designing. It was a vehicle to get into the world of design, it was very clear to me that I was not going to become a woodworker that had that be my career. And if we’re thinking about tangibility, I wanted something to last. I didn’t want to just make something and trash it. I wanted to have an object for a long time. So it wasn’t that I was a bad woodworker, it’s like you said, I wasn’t geeking out. But I know people that do.
Amy: Yes, I do too. (Laughter) I love the process of making things because it’s so embodied and there is a sort of physicality, a fluidity of movement… your body needs to work in concert with the material and the machine and all of that. It is sort of a dance on the shop floor.
John: 100%. it was very clearly choreographic. It’s movement. I remember thinking that I didn’t know anything and that I was constantly feeling like lost in this world of design, which was both terrifying and very exciting. But I also remember thinking to myself, you are using all of your dance knowledge here, and choreograph knowledge. This is all the same thing, they’re just different terms, different practices. And once you learn those terms, it’s fine. You need to learn how to speak with this community, but you already know how to use your body in this way. And also how to work really diligently, how to work independently, how to take criticism, all of those things are heavily from dance.
Amy: Yeah and how did your confidence develop in terms of you as a designer, was it your own eye that you were tuning? Were you getting into a critical discourse kind of community?
John: Yeah. I don’t think I had a lot of confidence for a long time. I knew that I was excited about what I was doing, just self-driven excitement of the newness and the creative expression. I didn’t know if anyone else enjoyed it. I remember feeling I couldn’t really even ask people, because I didn’t have the language to talk about it yet. And I didn’t want to feel like a fool. This was where I was clearly… I could talk to you for days about dance history and all of the different work that I was inspired by and why does this look like this and the origins of things. And I knew nothing about the history of design. So I just withheld myself from really being out in the world for a while because I just didn’t know. I felt like I didn’t know enough to really put myself out there. Then it also was a bit of imposter syndrome, which I think we all struggle with, especially young designers, and that continued for a long time, feeling just like I was a fraud.
Amy: Sure. But let’s just put this in perspective because 2011 you’re on Sleep No More, you have this recognition that you might need to make some adjustments in your life. You open Coil + Drift, your own company, your own design studio in 2016, that’s only five years.
John: Yeah, it was fast. (Laughter)
Amy: So in five years you taught yourself design and fabrication and you got to a place where you wanted to do your own studio. So imposter syndrome or not, that’s still a fast track.
John: No, I think it’s important for young people to know that these are all possible at the same time. You can feel kind of like a fraud and also be thrilled by your experiences at the same time. Like life is complicated. I was thinking about this period recently and realizing that it was so not linear, like I didn’t go from one thing to the next thing. I was dancing, I worked for a Dutch bicycle importer to try to learn how to run a business for a year, in that four year period. And I was working at Makeville Studios, figuring out how to make things. I was selling some things on Etsy and I was, at the same time, travelling with Einstein on the Beach like every three months going to different places all over the world. It was all happening at once and it was a very exciting time and very thrilling and also just like completely weird and unknown because even though dance was a difficult career that you often would need to find work, you have projects that would end, I was consistently employed for 10 years. I was comfortable and knew how to make my living and I was in this period where I was like, trying to figure out something new and didn’t really know how to do it. I mean I look at young designers now that I meet and they’re like, oh yeah, you know, I’m looking for an internship, or I would like to apprentice. I had no idea that that was an option. So (laughs) you know.
Amy: And that’s the thing that I’m infinitely and unendingly fascinated by, is that people who are compelled to create, find the way there almost out of sheer will and need. And whether that’s through art school or through a different creative modality, or completely kismet, all incredibly valid…
John: Totally, you’ll find your way there eventually, if this is what you need to do, 100%. There are moments for everyone where you don’t know if you’re going to make it and I think some people decide…whatever you choose at that point, is whatever you choose. So for whatever reason during those five years, I was just on a bender of pushing through new things and figuring stuff out. If I think about it now, I’m like, this is also the period that I met my now husband. A lot was happening at that time that was exciting and new.
Amy: So that is wonderful and it does sound like that was an incredible period of life, love coming into your life, along with this new love of design and you really consciously developing your agency around business practice and a creative practice that is grounded in objects. I want to talk about Coil + Drift because I want to know the origin story of you finally pulling the trigger on your own creative studio and then how you would describe your evolution from 2016 until now?
John: So during that five year period I was working, I would take projects, building things and designing things. So I was doing what dancers often do, project based work, in the design world, because it’s kind of what I knew. After I had built up enough of my own designs that I felt confident in them, and confident enough, like we were saying, I think it was when I just built up enough confidence that I could look at these pieces and say, yeah, they’re ready to show to the world. I had a studio that was in a shared woodshop, so it was like renting bench space. And I had worked with… I started working with a couple of outside fabricators. It started to become clear to me that the designs that I was making over those years were more and more complicated and more and more interesting if I had someone else who was really skilled to build them. So when Coil + Drift launched in 2016, it was at ICFF, it was the smallest booth possible, in the back. [1.05.00] And I think about half of the pieces that I showed, I had made myself and half had been made by a woodworker that I had become close to. And yeah, it was the start of the studio, it was the start of a period of just creating and putting things out into the world under this brand and creating the identity of something new, of Coil + Drift, which very early on I knew would be material forward. I wasn’t interested in disguising or painting things; I wanted the material to be recognizable for what it was.
And I knew that the way that these forms were taking shape, three-dimensionally, had to do with my understanding of the form and movement from my dance background. I didn’t exactly know how, but I knew it was about negative space and a lot of the work that I was making was something that would change shape as you moved around it. I’m thinking of like the geometric dusk coffee table that’s no longer in the collection, but we made for many years, that really looked like a different piece depending on where you saw it from. And there’s still work in the collection that’s like that. I think that identity remains. But yeah, it was about creating, putting things out there and if I’m really looking at it for the first couple of years, it wasn’t so much about building systems in an infrastructure in that way of talking about a company. It was about introducing this thing to the world.
Amy: Hey, that’s what you’re doing in a production.
John: Yeah.
Amy: Now it’s coming together, the theatric happening…
John: I was putting on a show and I still am. But yes, 100%, and it’s all I knew. So each time we would launch something, you look at the earlier collections and it’s like a chair, maybe one or two lights, a side table, and none of them had been fleshed out in different iterations. The lighting wasn’t like sconces, pendants, chandeliers, I was creating little worlds. Which I still think is a fun way to approach it. It’s not very useful from a standpoint of like, thinking about your clients, because someone will see, an interior designer will see a sconce and say, hey, can we do that as a floor lamp? And if you don’t make one, then it’s a custom order, there’s only so many times you’re like, okay. (Laughs) Enter me learning how to actually operate a company, which was the next phase. But yeah, the beginning it was just putting on shows.
Amy: And shows you did. The Unconscious Forms show was a literal mix of your collection with choreography…
John: Totally.
Amy: And to stunning effect.
John: So that was 2018 and I really think that’s the culmination of the putting on shows as a way of being a design studio. That spring did four shows between March, April and May. We did Collective Design, remember Collective, which was so fun. And we had two live dancers performing in the booth once a day. So if you happened to be there… we would never tell anyone when it happened, then you could see it, and that was really special. And then we made a film with those dancers, this was all including the new collection, about the new collection, but the dancers were literally using these objects to dance with. I think the film is still up on our website, you can find it. But the film was then showed in a gallery context on three screens in Soho and we made three iterations of our SOREN Chair that was exaggerated objects of art that we also showed in that context. And then we also did the AD Show and ICFF that year (laughs). And by the end of that spring I was just,, completely exhausted and fully performed out. I had taken it to its natural conclusion, and without really realizing it at the time, I went searching for a new understanding of how to operate a business sustainably and it turns out that original seed of being curious about running a business as well, I mean that was real. When I started to dive into leadership and business entrepreneurship and how other people have experienced it and the wisdom that people have learned, I just started eating it up, and I’m still eating it up. It’s a whole other world of magic that people are discovering every day. There’s a new book to read every day and I’m reading them all. (Laughs) Anyway, it started after that insane 2018 year. We did get a lot of recognition from those four shows and we’ve always had a healthy amount of press, I would say. It’s not just natural, we’ve always worked very hard to have a healthy amount of press and to represent ourselves well, I think. I’ve always done my own PR.
Amy: That is something that has struck me about the way that you run the brand, is you sort of understand all of the ancillary mechanisms in order to get a healthy amount of press, you also understand you need good photography, you need to develop relationships with the people who are writing the articles and…That’s something I think Coil + Drift has done really well without just being self-promotional. It feels very organic to the way you operate and it also feels like you’re doing it with a dancer’s fluidity.
John: Thank you, yes. I think the independent designers in the US, by and large, are often trying to just tell a story and that is what is interesting about what we’re doing. We’re making interesting new work and telling a story and press is just introducing that story to more people and saying, ‘hey do you want to come along and see this, and be a part of this?’ So yeah, my strategy has just always been to continue to understand the story that we’re trying to tell.I mean we’ve had a number of really beautiful pieces written about the connection between dance and design and me and how that is kind of manifested in Coil + Drift’s work. And I still have to remind myself that that’s not flushed out yet. There’s more that we could say. People want to talk about… this is weird, it’s interesting, it’s not common. It’s a story that people want to talk about. Just because I live that every day, doesn’t mean it’s done. But that’s what works. That’s what works. Tell your story and be personal and yeah. Anyway, that’s been our experience with media. But I did need to find a way to holistically run the business where we could really have a healthy profit and sustain ourselves and start to think about future visioning and goals. And that’s how I found my way into an ongoing relationship with a business consultant and with her guidance creating a community of advisors around Coil + Drift that I am constantly going to, to help us shape and understand how we run the business now. And that’s the kind of phase from 2018 to where we are now. It’s like slowly chipping away at those goals. The first goal was start learning. And then here we are today where we have moved the business out of the city. I have personally moved out of the city. We live in a rural setting upstate. We have a 3,000 square foot studio and we build all of our own lights, which was not the casewhen the studio was in New York, we worked with a fabricator.
Amy: So your team is growing, and your showroom is exquisite and you’ve made the shift, I think, from the city to the Catskills, you need to tell me what precipitated that shift and also how… is it influencing the work coming out of Coil + Drif.
John: Totally. What took us out of the city, if I’m really pulling back and honest, it’s the desire to be back at the ranch that I grew up working at. And it wasn’t just the ranch. I spent a lot of time outside as a kid. Oregon is just a natural landscape, so there’s a lot of space and a lot of wildness and I needed that and I didn’t allow myself to think about that when I was dancing. Because I had to be based in New York City if I was going to be an American dancer. And I love New York City, I was there for 20 years and I have no bad feelings about the city, but I really craved a different life and space and being close to nature and being able to be outside. So yeah, my husband and I bought a tiny little house, we actually bought it just before the pandemic, which was just a totally lucky decision in terms of timing because the real estate costs have gone up so much now. We bought it for not a lot of money and it’s a very ugly, small house, on a lot of land, that I immediately started renovating myself when the pandemic hit, so that was also something to do when we were all locked down. But it was going to be a weekend house. That was going to be my connection to the land, which would have been wonderful. Of course, I think like a lot of people, the moment that I spent all of my time here during the pandemic, I was like, how do we do this? How do we not spend time in the city as much? And so the conversation started and today it’s possible because of flexibility on a lot of fronts. My husband works three days a week in the city and then spends the rest of his time up here and we also made a very smart, inexpensive real estate purchase in the city many years ago in Flatbush and so we moved to a less popular neighborhood and bought an apartment and that allowed us to buy this place upstate. So we’ve made two good real estate decisions, that’s the truth of why this is all possible. And now here we are.
Amy: It sounds like you’ve had a bit of luck, but you’ve also had a lot of intentionality informing a lot of your choices.
John: For sure.
Amy: And it does seem like you’re in your happy place.
John: Yeah.
Amy: Your work is grounded in human connection and materiality, the materials themselves are not camouflaged in any way, they’re just very honest.
John: Yeah.
Amy: So much about what makes your work feel like it’s so light and has so much movement is because of the way the negative space is considered within the object.
John: I think it’s even more about space because it’s a different kind of space up here, and negative space definitely plays into it. So yes, we just launched our new collection, which is called Loon, and it’s only lighting, it’s eight fixtures, broken up into two families. And it’s a complete product of this place. It’s a collection of the Catskills, for me, of this first moment and I’m imagining that it will develop and future collections will also be influenced by this place, but this is like the first and it will always be the first. The first family is called Ridge and it’s a kind of exploration in different iterations of this… what looks like a leaf shape. And we call it ‘Ridge’ because it has this spine down the middle and then there are symmetrical, curved sides. And yeah, so it’s four different iterations, two sconces, two different sized sconces, a chandelier and a huge pendant. And each one is a kind of idea of looking at this shape, which we originally came to by exploring different seeds of the area. Seeds, leaves, birds, there are a lot of similar shapes in those three things. So seeds moved to leaves, leaves with some of those fixtures moved to birds, and specifically the downward push of a big wingspan, that almost A-shaped, but curved, curved A-shape. And those shapes all influenced these four different iterations, so the giant pendant really looks] like a swooping bird from the side. The chandelier looks like… to me it looks like a kind of branch or a tree that hasn’t had enough water and is just getting a downpour and is kind of waking up. It’s really a capturing of a specific moment, that we’re familiar with because yeah, we’ve had a lot of those dry spells and wet spells, specifically with the climate change. And then the sconces are just pure studies of that simple curved shape. And then the other part of the collection is this… we call it like a bell-shape, but it’s also a curved bell-shape, so we think about the flowers, what are they called… it’s a specific type of flower, but it has this curved bell-shape that hummingbirds are obsessed with. So that was the starting point for the Foundry Collection, which we then took this delicate flower shape and combined it with this experience of sand casting. Because we have a local forge here in the Catskills that does sand casting, and that just felt like so special and under-utilized in lighting. I hadn’t seen many people casting forms for lighting.
Amy: No, and also the placement, it’s interesting because you don’t normally hang forged pieces, right? So there’s something so delicate about the form, but then when it’s cast in such a sturdy material and then suspended, it’s absolutely striking.
John: Thank you. It’s extremely heavy as well, and yeah, that’s on purpose and it’s not for everyone because it’s heavy. But for me there’s no other way to get that true heft and like you’re saying, the combination of this delicate feeling with this heft, is really where the sweet spot of this fixture, and that to me has so much to do with dance. It’s all about, what I think of is have you experienced lifting someone who is asleep versus lifting someone who knows they’re about to be lifted. Somehow the person who is ready to be lifted is like way lighter. The person who is sleeping is like, oh my god, I can’t, you know. It’s like I can’t get you up. And that has to do with how we support ourselves and so thinking of scale and weight, seeing this piece that looks like it shouldn’t be hanging because it’s so heavy. But it hangs perfectly.
Amy: An image is coming to mind of you getting lower in your plie’s and yet still needing to be aloft so easily. There is a sort of gravity, but it’s not a weighted gravity as much as it is a kind of… I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like gravity in motion.
John: Yeah, it’s about balance comes into play then. It’s about, not balance like symmetry, but balance like how do you… where are you in that plum line and weight and yeah, I don’t know, when you said that it made me think of, for me, and I don’t know that this is… it’s really personal to me, this collection is about, it has a melancholiness to it, which is very personal to me. It’s kind of the place that I have been in off and on for a couple of years. I lost my dad a couple of years ago and it was rough.
Amy: Oh, I’m so sorry.
John: Thank you, he was a fantastic person. Had a totally massive effect on my life, but effect specifically on my creative process and in relation to this conversation, I can look at these fixtures from this collection and see that kind of, yeah, melancholy feels like the word, because it’s not sadness. There’s real life in these forms, but there’s something about that, when we’re talking about weight, that comes up for me because…
Amy: But it’s the weight of wistfulness or nostalgia, it’s not a heavy weight.
John: Completely, there’s movement in it, yeah. For me, grief is such a weird thing and it is really always there, but we’ve been the opposite of stagnant since this happened, ‘we’ being the studio, myself, we’ve been really moving and growing and expanding. So anyway, it’s kind of interesting to think about these new creations, almost being like inspired by this feeling of loss in a way, but not in like a… not in a way that’s directly sad, more in just like how can we create from this, you know?
Amy: As you’re saying that, I’m also reminded that when something moves out, something has to move in, right, it’s the nature of convection.
John: 100%.
Amy: And if the grief flows through you and there’s this convection and what comes forward from that are those beautiful pieces, then that seems to make perfect sense to me, that seems to light up…
John: Totally, it’s like the way that I would want to honor a life, right? Without really thinking about it. Again, why conversations like this are useful, but it’s also, I don’t think this collection would have been that way if I had said, oh, I’m going to make a collection honoring him, that’s not… it needed to not be that direct for it to be what it is now. Which you know, yeah, I should just say since we were talking about imposter syndrome earlier, of course that’s still around sometimes, but I love this collection.
Amy: Good.
John: It’s like something that I would not have necessarily said before, so it’s like a real pleasure to make work that you enjoy. I don’t think it always happens.
Amy: No, you’re not always able to get to that real authentic place from which something comes forward. But when you do, and when it’s so of yourself, you can’t be an imposter there. You know what I mean? It’s your offspring. (Laughter)
John: Totally and then suddenly it’s so much easier to talk to people about. It’s so much… it just feels like right… also there’s a big part of this equation that we built this collection here. Like my team did this and we not only built the finished product, but we went through iterations and iterations and iterations and we prototyped and we did kind of this thing which I have now been fantasizing about doing since 2018 when I realized that we should probably move the production inhouse if we want to really build a company that has like a real voice, a creative voice. And really high quality standards, and makes really beautiful, extraordinary pieces. And so this is the first time that we’ve done that from start to finish here and it feels really great. I have an amazing, amazing employee, Miranda who is indispensable in that process, or invaluable and we’re about to hire [1.35.00] a new person. So yeah, it’s going to be really interesting to see how we have planted this foundation of what a creative process could look like that feels really good and a sustainable systematized company that can make things and not get behind and all of that. And see that start to grow.
Amy: What’s on the horizon for Coil + Drift?
John: Yeah, so the way I describe the next five years is Coil + Drift will be a lighting studio that makes a really awesome shelving system. We will have less of our furniture offerings and we’ll focus very intensely on lighting and our HOVER shelving system, which is a kind of shelving system that lives in the world between built in, kind of mill work and a kind of freestanding unit. It feels very built in. You can move it from space to space, you can reconfigure it, but it has this very luxurious built-in quality and it’s made of really stunning materials. So we will always make it and I love it very much. But I think we will not make as much furniture. I don’t know what that means for the furniture because you know, it will still exist, so I don’t know what that means. But the lighting will just continue because I really love the process of designing lighting and we’ve gotten very good at making it here, so I want to explore that and flush that out. So that’s what the studio will look like. We will probably be in a larger building; we will own it. And we’ll be in the Catskills still. I have a vision for 10 years of the team being like a maximum of 14 people. I don’t really want to go bigger than that. I think it’s really important, especially for young people to think about what growth means and how you define growth and don’t let other people define it for you. So for me growth means this, what we’ve been talking about in terms of learning and discovering and becoming, understanding how to build systems, efficiency, that’s the growth that I want that will be more and more profitable. We have plans to streamline and, yeah, make really beautiful fixtures. And then there’s some sort of… I want to explore more and more about how Coil + Drift can maybe collide with hospitality in a way that… like as a vehicle to show maybe new work. So I’m kind of thinking about showrooms and a presence in the city and these kind of traditional ways that we would grow and maybe have a little gallery in the city, somewhere else in the world as well. Those are possibilities. But I’m curious about that taking shape in a different way as well. Could there be a hospitality component involved in that? If you were whisked away to the Catskills for three nights in a beautiful home, that was filled with Coil + Drift work, and that’s how you saw the new collection, wouldn’t that be interesting? And it’s not something that’s available on Airbnb, it’s some sort of more special experience. I mean if we’re really honest and we really want to get into the visioning, I’m like, what if it’s on a horse farm (laughter)… what if this space is surrounded by horses? Throw out the idea of a horse farm that you have in your head, what if we’re talking about an architect designed space, really like mind-blowing, but feels like it lives in the Catskills beautifully. And then that’s how you come and experience this work. So we’re thinking about that, we’re writing, it’s in the early stages, but I just said it, so now it has to happen! (Laughs)
Amy: Yeah, I’m glad you put it out there on this podcast. (Laughter) that sounds beautiful and that also sounds like it’s fulfilling on more levels than just work and creativity. But separately from Coil + Drift, more about John and your personal self-actualization, what’s your vision for the future and what is something that you need personally in order to keep growing and growing into your fullest self?
John: The first thing that comes to mind is more travel because we, my husband and I, we both find it very difficult to travel because… it’s a great problem to have, we really love where we are and we also have a dog and a cat that we love very much (laughs) and it’s hard to be away from them, as funny as it sounds, but it’s real, so I’ll say it. But yeah, some travel would be really, really good for me in the near future and I don’t know, I’m just going to say… so my brother and sister-in-law from France just visited last week and it’s being with someone who is from another country, it’s a massive opportunity. They live on a beautiful small village in the center of France, we should spend time there. So yeah, I think I’m going to say what I need is to live, not to live, but to spend more time traveling and maybe spend more time in France and you know, maybe actually become fluent instead of just conversational, because that would be really helpful.
Amy: I love it, second generation of Francophiles.
John: It’s got to happen, got to put it out there.
Amy: You are a delight. I love your work and I love you as a human, so thank you so much for sharing your story [1.45.00] and for being so honest about even the hard parts and the imposter syndrome and the love of your dog and cat.
John: Thank you, thank you Amy, it’s like such an honor to be on Clever, because I’ve told you that I’m a super-fan. (Laughter) Keep doing this amazing show and yeah, I hope that it helps people to hear that, you know, people are human and the world is tough and also beautiful. Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening. For a transcript of this episode, and more about John, including images of her work, and a bonus Q&A - head to cleverpodcast.com. If you like Clever, there are a number of ways you can support us: - share Clever with your friends, leave us a 5 star rating, or a kind review, support our sponsors, or hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter, er X - you can find us @cleverpodcast and you can find me @amydevers. Please stay tuned for upcoming announcements and bonus content. You can subscribe to our newsletter at cleverpodcast.com to make sure you don’t miss anything. Clever is hosted & produced by me, Amy Devers. With editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is a proud member of the Surround podcast network. Visit surroundpodcasts.com to discover more of the Architecture and Design industry’s premier shows.

John, dance by Boris Charmatz, photo by Elizabeth Romanski

What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten?

Carve out time to play and dream about the future. Like actually put it on your calendar at least once a week. Start with 5 minutes.

What’s your current favorite tool or material to work with?

We don’t own one yet, but I’m in the market for a really good sand blaster to clean and help begin the finishing process on our sand cast Foundry fixtures. They are so satisfying to use and will help us achieve a clean metal surface while retaining the beautiful topographic texture that comes with sand casting.

What book(s) is on your nightstand?

The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer

John dancing in high school, dance by Sarah Slipper.

Favorite restaurant in your city?

Stumble Out Bar

Ridge Chandelie, 2023, COIL_DRIFT. Photo by Zach Hyman

Who do you look up to and why?

-Lucinda Childs for her choreographic brilliance, fearlessness, and staying power over many decades.

-Varian Fry, who I’m reading a lot about these days. He was an American journalist who lived in France and helped anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees, many of whom were brilliant artists, escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

-My father, Scott Sorensen-Jolink, who was the most kind, honest, and deeply generous person.

Unconscious Forms by Coil + Drift. Photo by Charlie Schuck

Vignette 1, 2023, by Coil + Drift. Photo by Zach Hyman

What are the last five songs you listened to?

Layers by Little Dragon, April + VISTA
Some Sunsick Day by Morgan Delt
Danza De Sombras by Gizmo Varillas
CICADAS by Young & Sick
Spinning Away by Brian Eno, John Cale

Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.