Encountering an installation of Ruth Asawa’s abstract sculptures is like entering an enchanted garden where nature, industry, art, and craft have fantastically merged. Suspended from the ceiling, made of metal wire looped and tied into a sinuous mesh, the works consist of interlocking, often nested spheres, lobes, bubbles, and teardrops. The drooping, biomorphic structures suggest translucent embryos and wombs, iridescent sea creatures, hanging tiered baskets, seedpods, spiderwebs, and onion domes. Delicate and ebullient, they cast ethereal reflections and shadows, but they are also sometimes ominously large, their knitted skins resembling chain mail.
Asawa’s sculptures, and the associations they summon, reflect the diversity of her experiences and influences. Her parents were Japanese immigrants who had a small farm in Norwalk, California, where she was born in 1926, the fourth of seven children. In 1942, during World War II, the family was held in a Japanese internment camp, where, behind barbed-wire fences, Asawa studied with a Japanese-American animator from Walt Disney Studios.
