Mumbai-based artist and designer Ashiesh Shah has always been drawn to the inherited. His atelier's work sits at the precise intersection where craft becomes philosophy, where a vessel is never just a vessel.
With TAAMR, named for the Sanskrit word for copper, Shah brings nine sculptures to London's Carpenters Workshop Gallery at Ladbroke Hall, six minutes from the candy-hued pastel townhouses of Notting Hill. It is his first exhibition built entirely around a single material, and copper, in these works, is never fixed at its most pristine.
It transfigures. It responds to air, time, and touch. It carries traces of movement, use, and change.
Like his other works, TAAMR extends its rootedness in the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi — the beauty of imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness — and in doing so, Shah finds a quietly radical alignment: an Indian designer working with a material sacred to his own tradition, through a lens borrowed from another, arriving somewhere entirely his own. The nine works on view blend futuristic geometry with handcrafted materiality, gravitating toward form that feels simultaneously ancient and unresolved.
Works like 'Matka Mobile', 'Kumbh', and the 'Brahmand' cabinet series rest between craft and craftsmanship and Shah insists the distinction matters. Craft, for the atelier, is inheritance: the Channapatna bead, the copper vessel, each carrying knowledge that predates the design industry. Craftsmanship is the skill brought to that inheritance: how mirror fragments are cut and placed for light to behave correctly, how Indian holy beads are strung with accumulated weight rather than decorative intent, how copper is worked so it ages without losing structural coherence. In TAAMR, neither is subordinate to the other.
This is consistent with Shah's broader practice. His Svarn Collection, shown at the India Art Fair 2025, merged India's historical identity as Sone Ki Chidiya( the golden sparrow) through works including 'Svarn Lok' and 'Svarn Bhumi', imagining creation through a contemporary lens using ancient metalworking traditions like Dhokra, brass, and silver. Where that collection reached for a mythological and national scale, TAAMR is more intimate. Copper here is not a statement of abundance. It is a medium, a metaphor, and a kind of movement where material remembers beyond its trend that calls for it.
"Craft is not a trend. It is legacy," Shah says. "Every object in TAAMR begins with something inherited — a bead, a vessel, a form shaped the same way for centuries and asks what it can become without losing what it is."
TAAMR is on view at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Ladbroke Hall, London from 11 July to 11 September 2026.