In Service to the Marvelous
Kyleigh Kühn’s practice moves between sculpture, installation, speculative design, and gathering. Through objects, environments, and rituals, she creates interventions in everyday life that propose ways of restoring reverence, wonder, and heightened attention to both private and public experience.
Working with stone, mirror, metal, incense, plants, smoke, and scent, Kühn creates works that often require activation: they are burned, tended, inhabited, shared, or encountered over time. Rather than functioning solely as objects to be observed, the works operate as propositions for how one might live—inviting the viewer to become a participant in acts of attention, remembrance, hospitality, care, and ceremony.
Her practice draws from botanical forms, traditional craft, and the enduring impulse to imbue objects and places with meaning. Recent works translate these concerns into sculptural forms that hover between artifact and ritual object, often suggesting ceremonies that might belong equally to the ancient past or an imagined future.
Kühn’s approach to making developed through years of work with artisans, farmers, and craftspeople in Afghanistan and other post-conflict regions. Earlier projects spanning handwoven carpets, jewelry, artist books, gardens, and independent art spaces established an ongoing interest in cultivation, symbolic objects, collaborative making, and the capacity of environments to shape human behavior.
Increasingly, Kühn approaches speculative design as a means of asking not simply what the future might look like, but how it might feel and be lived. Her work proposes an alternative to the disconnection and disenchantment of contemporary life: one in which ritual, beauty, spirit, intimacy, and awe are not relegated to the past or treated with embarrassment, but understood as vital parts of being human.
Across sculpture, landscape, hospitality, and gathering, the practice asks a recurring question: what might change if we integrated ceremony with our everyday lives?
A seventh-generation Marin County resident, Kühn lives and works in San Rafael, California. She studied Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and Comparative Politics at the University of Oxford and Universidad de Buenos Aires.
