Robert Kelly - The Hidden Meaning Behind Wallpaper

Welcome to the first episode of this new series Thesis, in which every other week I am going to be interviewing academics, hailing from all fields of study, about the themes and ideas that underpin their respective research. You might be wondering who I am and why I wanted to do this, so I decided to pick this episode as it might give you some insight into my brain. One tool I have found useful over the years in my quest for new and interesting ideas, is to look for any glaring chasms between how much time I have spent thinking about an issue and how much time someone else has spent writing about that topic. The greater that gap, the more likely an idea is going to surprise or shock me. For the sake of discussion, we will call this idea a curiosity gap. Today’s episode is about one of these such chasms, that I stumbled on while searching on the website SSRN, the Social Science Research Network, which is a great research paper aggregator. Today's curiosity gap concern's wallpaper, which this episode centers around. This very first installment of Thesis is an examination of why interior decoration is such a fundamental human drive and what it's evolutions says about various societies throughout the ages. My guest is Robert M. Kelly who has been working with wallpaper as a paperhanger, researcher, consultant, and writer since 1976. In this conversation Robert walks me through the fundamentals of wallpaper scholarship, what it means for wallpaper to be meaningful and how to read wallpaper as a material representation of our values and beliefs.