Tate St Ives: Shelters for the Senses, Aleksandra Kasuba

This exhibition runs until the 4th October 2026.

Aleksandra Kasuba was born in Lithuania where she grew up at Ginkunai Manor with an idyllic life until World War II changed everything.  Her family manor was nationalised and her family left for Kaunus while she was left to finish school in Siauliai.  She then went on to study ceramics but her education was interrupted by Soviet and Nazi occupations.  She fled with her soon to be husband, the sculptor Vytautus Kasuba.

In 1947, the couple moved to the United States and Aleksandra began work as a Ceramicist initially.  Her art progressed from ceramics though.  I think initially, it began where ceramics met mosaics but soon she was making the most incredible walls, using bricks as her mosaic pieces.  From here, she began working in 3D and her art pushed the boundaries.  Without a doubt, her vision has inspired many artists and architects.

The exhibition began with a timeline of her life and work along one wall.  There was a video as well that talked about her work.  For an artist like Kasuba, this context is vital because so many of her works were large and architectural.  They can only be appreciated in videos, photos and diagrams, unless you make a visit in person.

As Kasuba moved from ceramics, she explored different mediums.  There are some early ceramic pieces and you can see a shift into mosaic and sculpture.  She clearly always had her architectural understanding.  Many creatives have themes and Kasuba clearly has hers, with the walker, a figure that often appeared.  An alter-ego, a dreamer, who walks through life.  There were many many pictures containing the little man in swirls of line and colour.  Dreaming III was a beautiful mosaic featuring the walker.  There were three small (relatively when compared to a wall) brick mosaics, beautiful in their monochrome geometry.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is definitely a recreation of Spectrum, An Afterthought.  This large piece is one you can walk through.  I guess the simplest way to describe it is a series of not exactly teepee tents, interlinked, and each lit with a different colour.  She used stretch fabric to make these complex curving shapes.  It is lovely to walk through, complex shapes and colours.  It is also lovely to walk around too.

The only thing that made this beautiful piece difficult for me, was that Kasuba combined the experience with scents that were specially created.  I find scent difficult, especially very strong or artificial scents but in particular, I am allergic to orange.  I was glad to see a panel detailing the contents of each scent.  It was clear I needed to avoid the scent sticks that people were able to use at certain times.  The problem for me though, was the scent lingered and spread to some extent through the rest of the expedition.  This was not an exhibition for me to linger in.

Things like these are lovely, it's great to incorporate all the senses.  I find though, that any attempt to engage any sense has to be exclusionary or problematic to someone.  Our bias is very much towards the visual when it comes to art.  It must be very hard for anyone with any sort of visual impairment to access art.

There were models, photographs and drawings of her brick walls and the various iterations of her shelter for the senses.  I especially loved the drawings.  These were incredibly complex technical drawings.  They really emphasized the beautiful geometry.

The next room featured another one of her shelters, a little one, which was like a nest, with beautiful textile art inside by Urban Jupena.  It would be a lovely spot for a nap or to read a book.  This room also included pictures and video of Rock Hill House.

After her husband died, Kasuba fell out of love with New York and left for New Mexico where she built her Rock Hill House.  It is the only one of her designs for a building to have been realised.  I can not quite decide if Kasuba was at exactly the right time, or a bit too early.  She inspired so many but I think if she was practicing now, there would be many more examples of her work as finalised buildings.  I am glad there is at least this one building that was fully realised.

She did produce further models of shelter ideas.  Artwork depicting them in different environments and these also feature in the exhibition.  The last room looked at her study of form where she used stretch fabric to create complex curving shapes in three dimensions.  Some were inspired by the shapes of shells and there were also some shelter models inspired by the shapes of shells.

Some of her pieces did not survive.  Her wall at World Trade Centre no.7 was sadly destroyed. Following her death, her archive of drawings and photographs was returned to Lithuania and some of the material will have come from there.  Some of this material would have been private, never published, the doodling's and projects of an active mind, the pieces in progress and development of ideas.  These things are interesting for sure, but not as exciting as her architectural pieces and so many of them are just too large to exhibit or even move, too difficult to recreate.

Her instinctive understanding of shape and geometry is just as exciting now as it was back when she was producing these pieces.