Ashiesh Shah Makes His UK Solo Debut with Taamr

In Sanskrit, taamr means copper. It also, depending on how you read Ashiesh Shah's practice, means transformation.

Shah's first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, simply titled Taamr, opened at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in London's Notting Hill on June 11 and runs through September 20, 2026. The show brings together a new body of sculptures and design objects, all anchored in copper, not just as a material choice but as a conceptual framework. The logic is deliberate: the Copper Age was a period in human history defined by the shift from stone to metal, from one way of building the world to another. Shah is using that history to mark a shift in his own practice.

What the Show Actually Looks Like

The works are grounded in the craft traditions Shah has spent years building relationships with across India. The Brahmand Cabinet pairs antique copper pots, the kind that sat in Indian kitchens for generations before being replaced by steel, with a sharp black granite base. The Mirror Mosaic Coffee Table uses hand-laid mirror fragments that echo the precision of Jadau and Kundan jewellery making. The Dveep Coffee Table draws on Mumbai's identity as a former archipelago, its mirrored surfaces connected by hand-turned Channapatna beads, a craft form from Karnataka. The Matka Mobile is a hanging sculpture of handcrafted earthen pots arranged as sun, moon, and earth, moving in slow orbital rhythm.

None of this is decorative in the conventional sense. Shah puts it simply: "Copper is not a restriction. It is a lens. Everything I have spent years exploring — craft as living knowledge, the relationship between maker and material, the way an object carries time — it all becomes visible through this one material. Copper corrodes. It patinates. It holds the trace of every hand that has touched it. That quality of accumulation, of being shaped by time rather than resisting it, is exactly what I have been reaching for across every project. The material just made it legible." He describes this collection as one where art becomes bracketless, a phrase that sounds like marketing until you stand in front of the work.

Why Does This Show Matter?

Shah trained at Parsons School of Design in New York and spent the early 2000s working in the city before returning to Mumbai, where he founded Atelier Ashiesh Shah in 2017. Since then, he has collaborated with craftspeople across India, from longpi pottery in Manipur to dhokra metalwork in Chhattisgarh, building a practice that sits deliberately at the intersection of art, architecture, and design. Carpenters Workshop Gallery, where Taamr is showing, represents some of the most significant names in collectible design globally, with spaces in London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. Shah is the first Indian designer to hold a solo show at the gallery's London space. That is the detail worth pausing on.

Taamr is on view at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, 79 Barlby Road, Notting Hill, London, through September 20, 2026.