Open Studio Priyanka Rana

The Ant Project presents artist-in-residence Priyanka Rana's open studio.

Priyanka Rana is a sculptor born in India in 1980 and based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her practice, rooted in untreated Californian woods, connects cultural memory, ecology, and material intelligence, drawing on both scientific and ancestral ways of understanding the natural world.

During her residency, Rana is developing the conceptual and compositional framework for an interdisciplinary project called Darshan, in collaboration with Puragra (Raja) Guha Thakurta, Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, and textile artist Nikita Shah. The work brings together three distinct practices: Tarkashi wire inlays on wood panels, images from the James Webb Space Telescope, and Nikita Shah's Kalamkari fabric curtains. Kalamkari is an ancient Indian tradition of hand-painted or block-printed textiles. In Darshan, Nikita's textile works will serve as veils that interact with the sculptural panels.

At its heart, Darshan is a meditation on deep looking. The Sanskrit word darshan means both “seeing” and the grace that comes from being seen — a concept that bridges the intimate, handmade act of inlaying metal wire into wood and the vast, technological act of imaging light from the edges of the universe.

Tarkashi is a 500-year-old metal wire inlay craft from Jaipur, Rajasthan, in India — the name comes from taar (wire) and kashi (inlay). Fine threads of brass, copper, or silver are hand-hammered into delicate grooves carved into dark wood, producing intricate linear patterns.

— The Ant Project