Celestial Lace
Mirror-Polished Stainless Steel
Celestial Lace is a series of multi-layered mirror-polished stainless steel sculptures developed by Drue Kataoka Studios.
A frothy vocabulary of intricate fragments of 316L cast steel brought to a mirror polish finish. Cantilevered over smooth, fluid forms — steel behaving like water drops caught in slow motion, like light caught among crystals.
Each piece begins twice: as a small model built by hand, and as a digital twin refined with the most advanced 3D modeling tools. The two inform each other until the form earns its existence.
Then the ancient and the industrial meet. Using the lost wax technique — the same process that cast bronzes millennia ago — molten steel is poured into forms that exist for a single casting and are destroyed to release the work. There is no undo. Every pour is a commitment.
Where the process demanded tools that did not exist, we engineered our own.
The final stage is the longest: months of meticulous hand-polishing for the large pieces, until the steel stops being a surface and becomes a mirror — dissolving into sky, trees, and the face of whoever stands before it. The sculpture borrows the world around it and gives it back transformed.
