Following her Los Angeles debut with Leeson Gallery, Kelly Akashi presents a new body of sculptural works in New York that reflect on how loss and memory are endured and transformed over time. What Akashi creates in the West 24th Street space is a series of poignant moments in reflection that are both personal and deeply universal. Inspired by nature and traditional crafts, the delicate presence, crafted from bronze, corten steel, glass and flame-worked stone, presents fragile moments of beauty, care and endurance – the artist’s fleeting forms sustain a sense of organic vulnerability and change.
The inspiration for this work is Akashi’s recent interaction with the site of her former home and studio that was destroyed by the Los Angeles wildfires in 2025. There, she observed nature returning with resilience amidst the devastation. “This work” — a delicate glass sculpture of a plant — “started with a weed growing on my property, the mallow, which tends to take root in disturbed land. After destruction, when the soil loosens, it spreads very aggressively,” she told the Observer, as we walked through the “heirloom” before the opening.
She has immortalized that weed in the sculpture, which stands upside down atop a Corten steel base, as if it had just been uprooted from the soil. “I became interested in this paradox: 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 seem invasive or difficult to control,” she explained. By presenting it upside down, she wanted it to appear exposed, emphasizing the roots, subterranean systems and what remains hidden beneath the surface.
On another plinth, a plexiglass dome protects a fragile form, suggesting both containment, permeability, exposure and fertile contamination with occasional events that keep the material in motion. “A lot of my work is about crystallizing shapes or fleeting moments in time, but I approach that through different techniques,” Akashi added. Originally trained in photography, she sees sculpture as another way to create relationships with a subject through varying degrees of proximity and physical engagement.
Leeson’s work uses borosilicate glass, allowing her to engage not only with material experiments but also with historical genealogies, as the medium recalls lampworked botanical models from the 19th century. “I am interested in tracing those histories and material lineages through the work,” she asserted. “I also love the tension between fragility and structure. A lot of these shapes feel delicate, but they find their own balance.”
More recently, she has become interested in how man-made decorative traditions, such as embroidery, lacemaking and appliqué, develop in dialogue with natural systems, often replicating their patterns and rhythms. Corten steel panels hang in the space, translating the embroidered tablecloths that once existed in her home, but now lost to fires, into something more massive and solid in form and volume. “Some of these works incorporate the same patterns as my grandmother’s lace tablecloths. Only partial fragments of them survived the fire, so the sculptures try to preserve the presence of the object and the absence of what was lost.”
Framed on the wall and gathered in the ashes of books, the articulated compositions evoke the interwoven, repetitive structures already found in nature, from the microscopic scale of snowflakes to the macroscale of geological or coral formations. “I recently learned that one of the top lace pattern designers is actually a scientist in Antarctica, because lace design is based on understanding mathematical structures,” Akashi said. “The connection between mathematics, science, beauty and nature is very compelling to me.”
Throughout the show, there are attempts to come to terms with a non-human time frame, and to re-synchronize the power of human creation with the power of nature. “Geological time is very important in my work. Akashi explained how, since being displaced after the fires, she has experienced time differently, returning to her home intermittently and noticing changes more slowly. “Gardening in particular has taught me something about recovery and duration. There is a slower process of transformation that exists beyond our immediate awareness.”
Akashi translates doily patterns into materials such as quartz and steel to connect intimate heirlooms with monumental sculptural traditions. “The stonework carries geological associations, while the lace decorations carry familial and cultural memory,” she said. “By bringing them together, I can think about what we inherit, what we preserve, and what we don’t know how to move forward with.”
In linking geological and human memory, she embarks on an exercise in mending today’s most radical rifts—between human and natural life, between human time and the broader cosmic order—reestablishing an emotional connection between the two that can help us understand the explosions in nature and the upheavals in culture at the heart of today’s crises.
In both practical and material terms, Akashi’s new works serve as symbolic and prophetic reminders that nature is always in motion, simultaneously developing and evolving. Her sculptures record time and transformation in each material, allowing traces of corrosion, oxidation and change to remain visible, embracing the ongoing processes through which matter registers duration and undergoes constant transformation. Having witnessed destruction and renewal firsthand, she creates powerful symbolic metaphors: a reminder that nature means change, that change is the essence of life, and that all that fails to change will eventually dissipate or die. But destruction and loss can also mean transformation.
Many of the processes it uses rely on craftsmen who have spent decades perfecting specialized techniques that have been passed down through 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 ingrained in their bodies through repetition and time. I am interested in how cultural knowledge is transmitted physically and materially across generations.”
At the back of the exhibit is a huge circular sculpture, a reconstruction of a jewel passed down to Akashi from her grandmother and lost in the fires. A psychologically monumental form largely sculpted from memory, it transcends the personal, oscillates between ornament and raw geology, situating intimate memory within a broader sense of geological and historical time. It is a universal reflection of what endures, and is part of Akashi’s attempt to challenge the anthropocentric perspective, embracing through this presentation a sense of time and meaning that transcends the individual.
This alchemy and transformation recur throughout her practice, and she links these concerns to her previous candle-making experiences, where she became fascinated by fire, heat, illumination, and the transformation of materials from one state to another. “I often work directly from plants by casting them from life. In a way, it’s another form of crystallization — preserving something fleeting. But I’m also interested in collaborating with nature itself,” she said, recalling how some earlier bronzes were designed for plants to grow through them.
The exhibition appears to be choreographed, as its design creates a rhythm of contemplation and space between the works. This may have been derived from Akashi’s photography training. “Photography always contains distance, but sculpture allows people to move around it, experience it physically and continue to form relationships with it over time,” she said. “I can create the conditions for those relationships, but then the work continues to change through viewers’ encounters with it. I want the works to create experiences rather than just objects. Different materials, scales, and techniques allow overlapping ideas to emerge in ways that 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. “Heritage is about something precious that has been passed down, about how we protect it, how we preserve it, and how we live with the possibility of losing it,” Akashi said.
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