LENA TAKAMORI: Ground Clouds
February 21 - March 14, 2026
Opening Reception: February 21, 3-5 pm
Hybrid Artist Talk: February 22, 2 pm
*UK-Based Artist Lena Takamori will be joining us via Zoom for an Artist Talk. Participants are welcome to join in person at the gallery or on zoom. Email us at info@lucylacoste.com for the zoom link.
Lucy Lacoste Gallery is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition, Lena Takamori: Ground Clouds from February 21 – March 14, 2026 in which the artist explores her interest in dualities and interiorities with her latest body of work. The exhibition title is a reference to fog, how it envelops and insulates, disguises and isolates. Through her ceramic sculpture the artist navigates the shifting ground of presence and absence, intimacy and distance, thought and actualization proving that sculpture can often say what words cannot.
Takamori’s Fog Landscape is a round vessel with a finely painted, semi-translucent forest and lake scene. Here she contrasts what is visible with what is diffuse - what is stark with what is soft. Blue Cloud furthers this theme, depicting a fast-moving rain cloud. The lightness of the cloud billows upward while a heavy linear downpour descends below.
In a new direction for the artist, Takamori presents several graphite black seated skeleton figures. Made through a process of squeezing and gouging, the distinguishing lines are not of painted glaze but of shadow and carved lines. These works explore the feeling of a presence within an absence – life force in its most elemental form.
Though formally distinct, these skeleton forms resonate with Kudzu House, a sculpture of a home engulfed by kudzu vines. In what was once the porch area, vines have left only two cavities, shadowed spaces that peer out and invite viewers to wonder what is inside. The abandoned shape becomes skeletal, a memento mori foretelling both decay and wild, abundant growth. Kudzu House’s mystery has a presence, although this house is almost certainly absent of inhabitants.
This sense of haunting is shared by Tree, a hulking dark sculpture with heavy branches and deep-set shadows. Though mysterious and dark, Tree does not appear sinister. Blue flecks of glaze offer a glimmer of magic within the layered canopy. A bright sheen amidst the sulking shadows, another duality.
Ground Clouds’ bird and human forms speak to a central theme of the artist’s work: a deeply embedded interiority. The slightly smaller than life-size pigeons close their eyes and pull their bodies tightly inward, one tucking its head below its wing – preening? sleeping? In a similarly tucked-up form, Ancient depicts a woman crouching low and resting her head on her arms atop a bent knee. Her large hairdo hangs downward, as do her long sleeves. Like the birds, her eyes are closed. This piece’s clothing and hairstyle seems to reference Japanese figurative sculpture. Though the work is called Ancient, perhaps referencing ancestors in Takamori’s own Japanese heritage, the woman’s expression is deeply familiar, her concentration and pursed lips cutting across the fog of generations. As mist descends and settles, the space between what we know and what we imagine expands. Takamori invites us to consider the gap between what we can see and what we can only imagine about these figures' interior worlds.
Swimmer depicts the head of a woman with long hair, looking past the viewer, seemingly absorbed in her own thoughts. Her face is articulated in a thin wash of white atop a darkly glazed surface. Is she rising from the depths of a murky pool? Surfacing from a dream? Is she about to resubmerge?
Another figurative work, Bath, is a softly painted sculpture of a mother who appears to be drying a baby. The towel held between her teeth, the mother is leaning the baby on her chest. In this moment, is her presence with the child, or are her thoughts far away? Here too, the fog appears, filling space within even the most intimate connections.
Lena Takamori is represented by prestigious galleries worldwide including Kuntsforum Solothurn in Solothurn, Switzerland and James Harris Gallery, formerly in Seattle, WA, now based in Dallas, TX. Her work is in the collection of the Musée Ariana in Geneva, Switzerland. She currently resides in Bristol, England.