Lahar

Overview

Location: Mumbai
Type: Product Collaboration
Year: 2026

Before there was a single sketch, there was a book. æquō sent Wearstler a historic volume on Indian craftsmanship, and buried in it were the region's centuries-old enameling techniques — the same dimensional, hand-fused color work the gallery's workshops still practice today. Reading it changed the order of operations entirely: instead of designing something and asking a workshop to execute it, she specified the materials first, bronze casting and glass enamel, and let those techniques tell her what she was allowed to make.

Kelly Wearstler x Aequo — lahar-diptych-img-text-1

Creative Process

That decision shaped everything that followed. æquō brought forward its enameling options and Wearstler responded intuitively, drawn to how light moves differently through glass fused to metal than it does across a painted surface. The brief kept evolving as the materials revealed what they could actually do — bronze took certain patinas better than others, enamel pooled and shifted in ways no drawing could predict — until the piece that mattered most to her, the 3D vector motif she'd worked with for years, found a new home cast directly into solid bronze.

Creative Direction

Lahar debuted alongside Tarang during Mumbai Gallery Weekend, inside an exhibition titled By Fire at the æquō Gallery in Colaba — rooms painted a weathered pink that set the bronze and enamel off rather than competing with them. Pieces were staged on pedestals of varying heights rather than a single uniform plinth line, turning the room into something closer to a landscape than a showroom floor, each object claiming its own sightline instead of fighting for the same one.

The 3D vector motif is something I've explored for a long time, so it feels deeply personal to me. I was thrilled to reinterpret it as a bold pattern cast in solid bronze.

Kelly Wearstler