After a much-celebrated debut in LA with Lisson Gallery, Kelly Akashi is presenting a new body of sculptural work in New York that reflects on how loss and memory are carried and transformed over time. What Akashi has created in the West 24th Street space is a sequence of evocative moments in a reflection that is deeply personal and universal. Delicate presences inspired by nature and traditional crafts, crafted in bronze, Corten steel, glass, and flame-cut stone, offer fragile moments of beauty, care, and permanence—the artist’s ephemeral forms that retain a sense of vulnerability and organic change.
The inspiration for this work is Akash’s recent engagement with the site of her former home and studio, destroyed by LA fires in 2025. There, she observed nature returning, resilient, amid destruction. “This work” — a delicate sculpture of a glass plant — “started with a weed growing on my property, a mallow plant, which tends to take root in disturbed soil. After destruction, when the soil is broken up, it spreads very aggressively,” she told the Observer as we walked through Heirloom before the opening.
She immortalized that weed in the sculpture, which stands upside down on a Corten steel plinth, as if it had just been plucked from the soil. “I was interested in that contradiction: on the one hand, the plant is regenerative and restorative, enriching the soil and helping it recover, but at the same time it takes over in a way that can feel invasive or difficult to control,” she explained. By presenting it upside down, she wanted it to feel exposed, emphasizing roots, subterranean systems and what remains hidden beneath the surface.
On another pedestal, a reticular glass dome protects a fragile form, suggesting both content and permeability, exposure and contamination fertile with the accidental events that keep matter in motion. “A lot of my work is about crystallizing forms or fleeting moments in time, but I approach that through different technologies,” Akashi added. Originally trained in photography, she sees sculpture as another way to create relationships with a subject through varying degrees of closeness and material engagement.
Lisson’s work uses borosilicate glass, which allows her to engage not only with material experimentation, but also with historical lines, as the medium recalls 19th-century lampwork botanical designs. “I’m interested in tracing those material histories and origins through work,” she emphasized. “I also like the tension between fragility and structure. A lot of these shapes look delicate, but they find their balance.”
More recently, she has become interested in how man-made decorative traditions—embroidery, lacework, and ornamentation—evolved in dialogue with natural systems, often repeating their patterns and rhythms. Corten steel panels hang across the space, translating the embroidered coverings once on her home, but now lost to fire, into something more monumental and stronger in form and scale. “Some of these works include the same patterns of tablecloths that belonged to my grandmother. Only partial fragments of them survived the fire, so the sculptures try to hold both the presence of the object and the absence of what was lost.”
Framed on the wall, the articulated compositions gathered in the book’s ashes recall the tangled, repeating structures already present in nature, from the microscale of snowflakes to the macroscale of geological or coral formations. “I recently learned that one of the main designers of lace patterns is actually a scientist in Antarctica, because lace design depends on understanding mathematical structures,” Akashi said. “That relationship between mathematics, science, beauty and nature is deeply compelling to me.”
Throughout the play there are attempts to adapt to a non-human time frame, resynchronizing the power of human creation with that of nature. “Geological time is very important in my work. I’m interested in being outside of human time,” Akashi explained, explaining how, since moving after the fires, she has experienced time differently, returning to her home intermittently and observing changes more slowly. “Gardening especially taught me something about recovery and longevity. There is a slower process of transformation that exists beyond our immediate perception.”
Akashi translates fabric patterns into materials such as quartz and steel to connect intimate heritage with monumental sculptural traditions. “The stonework carries geological associations, while the lace motifs carry family and cultural memory,” she reflected. “By combining them, I can think about what we inherit, what we preserve, and what we don’t know how to carry forward.”
In linking geologic and human memory, she begins an exercise in mending today’s most drastic rupture—between human and natural life, between human time and the larger cosmic order—by restoring a spiritual connection between the two that can help us understand the explosions in nature and ruptures in culture at the heart of today’s crises.
Both in process and materiality, Akash’s new works serve as symbolic and oracular reminders that nature is always in motion, simultaneously shifting and evolving. Her sculptures record time and transformation in any material, as she allows traces of erosion, oxidation and change to remain visible, embracing the ongoing processes through which matter records duration and undergoes continuous transformation. Witnessing destruction and regeneration itself, she creates powerful symbolic metaphors: reminders that nature means change, that change is the essence of life, and that anything that does not change will eventually disappear or die. But destruction and loss can also mean transformation.
Many of the processes she uses depend on artisans who have spent decades mastering specialized techniques passed down through the generations. “Collaboration and embodied knowledge are very important to me. Many of the techniques I work with come from deep craft lineages that I could never master on my own. I often collaborate with people who have practiced these traditions for decades,” she said. “Their knowledge is embedded in their bodies through repetition and time. I’m interested in how cultural knowledge is transmitted physically and materially across generations.”
At the back of the gallery is a monumental ring sculpture – a reconstruction of a jewel passed down to Akash from his grandmother and lost in the fires. A psychologically monumental form carved largely from memory, it transcends the personal, oscillating between ornament and raw geology, situating intimate memory within a broader understanding of geological and historical time. It is a universal reflection on what lasts, part of Akash’s attempt to challenge an anthropocentric perspective, embracing through this performance a sense of time and meaning that transcends the individual.
This alchemy and transformation recur throughout her practice, and she connects these concerns to her earlier experiments making candles, where she was initially fascinated by fire, heat, light, and the transformation of materials from one state to another. “I often work directly from plants by drawing them out of life. In a way, it’s another form of crystallization – preserving something ephemeral. But I’m also interested in collaborating with nature itself,” she shared, recalling how some earlier bronze works were designed to have plants grow through them.
The exhibition feels choreographed, in that its design creates a rhythm of contemplation and distance between the works. This may stem from Akashi’s photography training. “Photography always contains a distance, but sculpture allows people to move around it, experience it bodily, and continue to form relationships with it over time,” she argued. “I can create the conditions for those relationships, but then the work continues to change through the viewer’s encounters with it. I want the works to create experiences and not just objects. Different materials, scales and techniques allow overlapping ideas to emerge in ways I can’t always fully explain.”
Ultimately, the exhibition is a reflection on what it means to inherit and protect fragile forms of knowledge, memory and material culture in the face of loss. “Legacy is about something precious that has been passed down,” Akashi said, “and about the question of how we protect it, how we preserve it, and how we live with the possibility of losing it.”
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