Kyleigh Kühn’s practice explores the ways objects, materials, and rituals shape our relationship to place, to one another, and to the unseen.

Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Kühn draws from botanical forms, domestic architecture, material traditions, and the human impulse to give meaning to objects. Her recent works bring stone, metal, mirror, incense, smoke, and flame into compositions that exist somewhere between sculpture and ritual object—often designed to change through use, scent, light, or time.

Kühn’s relationship to material and making developed through years of work across Afghanistan and other post-conflict regions, where she collaborated with artisans, farmers, and craftspeople. Earlier projects span handwoven carpets, jewelry, artist books, gardens, and spaces for gathering, establishing an ongoing interest in traditional craft, symbolic objects, cultivation, and collective experience.

That interest has increasingly turned toward the creation of objects and environments that suggest their own forms of ceremony. Rather than reconstructing historical rituals, Kühn draws from the persistence of ritual itself—the recurring human desire to mark time, tend to objects, gather, remember, protect, mourn, celebrate, and make the ordinary sacred.

Her practice also extends into the spaces surrounding the objects. Through The Clementina in San Francisco and, more recently, Pegasus Gardens in San Rafael, Kühn has created environments for artists, chefs, musicians, and others to gather around art, food, landscape, and shared experience.

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.

In service to the Marvelous.