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 inside were the region's centuries-old enameling techniques, the same hand-fused color work the gallery's workshops still practice today. It changed her whole approach. Rather than designing something and asking a workshop to execute it, she chose the materials first, bronze casting and glass enamel, and let those techniques shape what she made.

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 design kept evolving as the materials showed what they could do. Bronze took certain patinas beautifully, and enamel pooled and shifted in ways no drawing could predict. The detail that mattered most to her, the 3D vector motif she had 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, so the room read like a landscape and every object had its own sightline.

Beyond the gallery walls, the collection was also photographed out in the streets of India — a deliberate choice to show objects built from centuries-old craft traditions out in the world. Shot in the place that shaped the technique, the pieces read as objects that could only have come from there.

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