In the spring of 1981, Betty Woodman and Cynthia Carlson started planning for An Interior Exchanged, an environmental collaboration presented in ARTISANSPACE at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1982. The artists decided that they would mimic each other and not make a clear line between their works, so Woodman extruded clay onto tiles while Carlson extruded clay for pieces that went on the wall. One wall was painted in a warm "Pompeian" red, while the opposite wall featured cool shades of blue-green and purple-gray, decorated with a pattern of fleurs-de-lis and tiny "meringues"—a technique Carlson learned from a baker friend of her father. Ceramic tile pilasters were installed at regular intervals or placed over existing columns. Between the pilasters, extruded acrylic paint was arranged to create a wallpaper-like pattern.

“Cynthia certainly introduced me to the possibility of using—really using the wall in my work,” Woodman said, “For me, environmental work, and work that relates to architecture, are absolutely within the tradition of clay. Collaborating with Joyce [Kozloff] and Cynthia reinforced my awareness of it. It was a matter of opening my eyes to Islamic tiles and mosaics from other cultures outside of the United States, among other things, that the [Pattern & Decoration] artists were interested in.”

Not only does the collaboration with Carlson signify Betty Woodman’s navigation between the art and crafts discourse with her rich materiality and decorative impulses, but it also marks the beginning of Woodman's lifelong gravitation towards the wall—from being sources of her inspiration, such as American wallpapers, trompe l’oeil Pompeian frescoes, or Egyptian wall paintings, to ample canvasses for her grand, masterful compositions.