Kelly Akashi's bronze casts cradle murano sculptures in 'Life Forms'

‘Life Forms’, US based artist Kelly Akashi’s first solo exhibition in Europe, currently on display at Barbati Gallery in Venice, Italy, features a range of new experimental sculptures by the artist. Crafted using hand-blown glass and cast bronze, the sculptures capture the physicality and tension that is individual to the two materials while also presenting themselves as fluid and cohesive objects that are in harmony. A vast range of natural occurrences and exploratory concepts like terrestrial features, interspecial relationships, growth and metamorphosis, and the gyrated nature of time guide the artist to sculpt an array of objects that, despite being sculpted by hand, embody a natural presence.

Crafted using classical glass making techniques, the sculptures are catalogued in the gallery on the bronze hands sculpted by her manually. These special exhibits enable the spectators to witness the glass and bronze sculptures as metaphorical offerings presented by the artist through her casted arm.

Kelly Akashi is a Los Angeles based artist who experiments with materials to create evocative and invigorating sculptural art pieces. Her formal training in analog photography and other traditional processes strongly inform her current artistic practice. Known to work with a range of different materials and mediums, ranging from wax, bronze, glass and silicone to copper, fire and rope, Akashi’s artistic practice is centred around exploring the limits that these materials can be pushed to, so as to create chiselled pieces that subvert the conventional materiality and form associated with them.

Apart from experimentations and explorations pertaining to materials, Akashi also pairs delicate and transient materials with solid ones to capture momentary gestures and occurrences into permanence. Her current exhibition ‘Life Forms’ also comprises sculptures crafted using hand-blown glass and hand- cast bronze. Further, her interest in capturing transient moments and mapping time-specific occurrences have also led her to study the fossils of extinct species, another piece of informal learning that inspires her work. Her creations have been exhibited at several galleries and museums, such as the Brooklyn Museum, SculptureCenter in New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Life Forms is both the first solo exhibition of the artist in Europe and the first exhibition by the Italian Barbati Gallery, which recently opened in the centre of Venice at the Palazzo Lezze in Campo Santo Stefano. This special collaboration between the Italian gallery and the American artist is physically commemorated in the spaces of the gallery through Akashi’s sculptures, which were crafted in Murano and Los Angeles, thus capturing the essence of both the countries.

Her showcases at the gallery also serve to commemorate the legacy of material knowledge and expert craftsmanship that has trickled down through generations and continues to be used by contemporary artists and designers to immortalise their ideas and thoughts. Akashi, while working on the sculptures in Murano, was able to utilise these rhythms, techniques and languages that are unique to the ancient glass-blowing tradition, while also successfully converging it with her extant learnings. Her ‘Heirloom’ sculptures that are displayed in the gallery represent an exchange of tradition, culture and community through bronze-casted flower motifs, created from hand-crocheted flowers.

Taking regular cues from the geological strata to draw abstract symbolism, Akashi crafts solid sculptures that mimic the indomitable spirit that characterises the terrestrial features that lend inspiration to her work. Other aspects that are incidental to the artist’s work include references to the relationship between the human, floral and animal worlds and the circular models of time. Utilising murrine, merletto and alchemical colours like avventurina that are traditional to the Murano glass blowing process, Akashi’s sculptures also serve to showcase the extent to which traditional processes and techniques can be stretched.

The central part of the exhibition space is dotted with three sculptures, ‘Lily’, ‘Fireweed’ and ‘Red Poppy’, which are flower sculptures hanging down from spiralling armatures. The twining supports that hold the colourful glass flowers aim to depict the circle of life and time. Another showcase ‘Triple Time Twine’ also features these flowers. Linking and looping with each other through spiralling supports, they present themselves as entities that are balanced and interdependent. Tethered mid air with the help of local boating ropes, the ‘florets’ that make up these sculptures are bound together in an ecosystem that fosters growth, cultivation and metamorphosis.

Kelly Akashi’s solo exhibition ‘Life Forms’ is on display from 20 April to 14 August 2022 at Barbati Gallery in Palazzo Lezze on Campo Santo Stefano, 2949, 30124 Venezia VE, Italy.