I first came across Francis’s work when she visited my studio a couple of years ago. She’d dropped me an e-mail out of the blue, explaining that she had missed my "Confronting the Chair" show at the Design Museum [London] and she would like to get to see this body of work.

I somehow knew her work from Beck’s Futures [a prize for contemporary art] at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, but had never drawn a connection between our work until that day. Getting to know Francis’s sculptures, I found lots of similarities in our work, beyond the obvious fact that we both use found, abandoned, and rejected objects. We both work in a very site-specific way directly in relation to the gallery/display environment and enjoy the collaborative aspect of working and sharing with other people. This led to a collaborative show at Salon 94 in New York in 2007 with artist Karl Fritsch and another the following year at Kate MacGarry gallery in London. Now we live together (actually, we’re married!) and share a studio. — Martino Gamper

Your work is very much connected to lots of other applied art and craft forms — furniture-making, design, jewelry, pottery, poetry. Do you think that fine art is a more superior art form that deals with more fundamental questions, or can applied art touch people in similar ways?

I don’t think art is superior to craft or design. Something is not more or less beautiful for being functional. Being an artist is great because I’m allowed to wander between disciplines. I guess I often swerve toward handmade crafts because I was brought up in a small city in New Zealand that values home-handmade objects. Good craftspeople often have the same reasons for making work as artists do; perhaps it’s just that they have a more confined scope. There are many cold ideas in art, so sometimes it doesn’t touch people at all, and there is gorgeous applied art, which people feel very emotional about and certainly contains interesting ideas that are about more than simply making.

A lot of your work is made from lost objects — found, abandoned, and rejected objects. Do you think that these objects mirror signs of use and neglect within our society? Do they give a better picture of the world than new objects?

Old objects have a certain patina of use, which I like, even if from a mass-produced background, because they have scars, which speak of individual stories, but also they often have strong visual connotations which imply society. When I first started working with found objects, I used ugly, old, unfashionable-for-the-second-time-around German pots from the ’60s and ’70s. These were very familiar objects, yet still exotic with their German ex-chic. I wanted to ignore my prejudices against them and used them simply as colorful vessels with interesting patterns. I added Egyptian, Canopic-style heads mimicking the glazes, turning them from ugly everyday to something charming. This is what I presumed you were trying to do, too, with your 100 chairs. I first liked them because it looked like two personalities had been welded — an old classic [Arne] Jacobsen sitting atop a disfigured painter’s chair looks like a chair with an interesting character and a colorful history. Does this idea ring true to you?

Yes, they are characters. In the case of the 100-chair project, it was important to me that each one had a very different and very charismatic identity, in some cases very eclectic and almost schizophrenic, just like people.

You once told me that you have very strong and vivid dreams. How many of these dreams become reality in your work, and how do you catch these dreams?

For years I kept a dream diary, which was a way of training myself to remember my dreams. I’ve often dreamt about seeing amazing art and try to remember it for copying in my practice, but what’s good in a dream is seldom good in reality.

You’re someone who has a very strong individual approach but you also collaborate with lots of people, especially on the Bart Wells project. How important is your personal aesthetic and view in a collaborative relationship?