Lily Clark & Ash Roberts: Dew Point

Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 17, 6—8PM

François Ghebaly Los Angeles is pleased to present Dew Point, a two-person exhibition featuring Los Angeles-based artists Lily Clark and Ash Roberts. 

Working across diverse media, Lily Clark and Ash Roberts engage with organic processes and states of ephemerality, phenomena that resist control or containment, to foreground the elusive bond between the natural and constructed world. Trained as a ceramicist, Lily Clark explores the physicality of water, often evoking the California landscape and Modernist architecture in her work. Her practice reflects on water’s fluid yet rhythmic behavior, tracing how it courses through natural environments and man’s engineered systems. Though she incorporates natural materials such as wood, fired ceramic and locally sourced stone, water itself remains her guiding medium. For Ash Roberts, her paintings emerge from a lifelong bond with the natural world, rooted in a childhood spent observing the gardens her parents tended to. As with Clark, Roberts’ work addresses the ineffability of nature, experiences that slip beyond the reach of language. A recent element in her practice is the use of gold leaf, applied either as an all-over wash or as a delicate accent, and referencing the Japanese art of Kintsugi. Engaging a soft yet radiant palette, she traces tensions between growth and fragility.  

In her work Inyo, Clark delicately suspends a roughly hewn alabaster boulder at the center of the room. The seemingly weightless rock is poised above a recipient steel basin, and releases water in slow, singular droplets. Upon reaching the basin, each droplet creates outward ripples, and as surface tension tries to flatten them back out the ripples return inward. The basin rests on an asymmetrical dolomite base sourced from now-closed quarries in the Owens Valley region, northeast of Los Angeles. Though the two stones appear nearly identical, dolomite forms through geologic deposition while alabaster is created through evaporation—processes that continue to unfold as the sculpture slowly evolves. Gravity is a key force here, seen also in Roberts’ series of paintings which consider the transience of tide pools, evanescent spaces shaped by the moon’s gravitational pull and suspended between land and sea. These microcosms teem with life and resilience, and are home to creatures that adapt to constant environmental change, serving as metaphors for fragility and endurance. 

In Night Pool, Roberts’ algae-laced triptych teems with intertidal life and is rendered in soft, luminous tones of turquoise, mossy green, and dusty lilac. This blurred palette acts as a soft veil over the landscape, suggesting a state of hypnagogia, or the waxing and waning of consciousness, like the currents of a tidal flow. From these depths, Clark’s Inyo emerges into the foreground, extending a conversation on water from the tidal to the geological. Together, the works ruminate on time, erosion, and reflection, tracing the cyclical forces of gravity and how they shape our materiality, landscape, and inner terrain.

Dew Point is organized by Agathe Pinard, Assistant Director at François Ghebaly.

Lily Clark (b. 1993 Los Angeles, CA) earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and has exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Netherlands; VDL Neutra House, Los Angeles; Marta, Los Angeles and Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles; among others.

Ash Roberts (b. 1986, Saratoga Springs, New York) holds a BFA from the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Her first solo exhibition will open at Francis Gallery in Los Angeles in February 2026. She lives and works in Los Angeles.