Ruth Asawa’s undulating organic forms are instantly recognisable – and unfailingly alluring. Woven in wire and plunging from the ceiling, her sculptures broke down the binaries between creative disciplines. “It doesn’t bother me. Whether it’s a craft or whether it’s art. That is a definition that people put on things,” she once said.

Born in California in 1926, Asawa began taking classes in art and painting at an internment camp in the US, where she and her family were among thousands of people of Japanese descent who were forcibly detained by the government during World War II. After her release, she enrolled at the legendary experimental art school Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she was taught by the likes of Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller. During those years, she travelled to Mexico with Albers and his wife, the fibre artist Anni Albers, and learned to weave in wire while visiting a village outside Mexico City. The technique – involving looping the material with a dowel – became a mainstay of her career. She compared the process to drawing in the air, saying “I was interested in the economy of a line, enclosing three-dimensional space.” In this trio of sculptures, on view at the Hayward Gallery exhibition, When Form Comes Alive (7 February — 6 May 2024), the interior of each piece is as important as its profile. As the show’s title suggests, they have a life of their own.

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