Priyanka Rana

Priyanka Rana’s early inquiries into aesthetics and philosophy and professional work in exhibitions led her to establish a full-time sculpture practice in 2018. Largely self-taught, Rana’s experiments with various sculptural materials have led to anearly-singular engagement with untreated wood. Her practice is rooted in ecology and sustainability; she works with local trees, transforming naturally felled trunks into abstract sculptures using a range of power tools. Rana chars many of her surfaces, which she likens to “painting with fire.” 

Born in India in 1980 and now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Priyanka Rana is a sculptor whose practice engages ecology, material intelligence, and the layered temporalities held within wood. Having lived across three continents—including formative periods in India and France—she works at the intersection of cultural memory and place-based knowledge, blending scientific awareness with ancestral understandings of the natural world.

Trained in mathematics and economics, Rana brings an analytical sensibility to form and process. She established her full-time practice in 2018, developing a self-directed, immersive relationship with wood grounded in experimentation, physical labor, and sustained material attunement.

Rana works primarily with untreated California woods, especially redwoods. Her process spans the physically dangerous to the meticulously delicate—moving from chainsaws and grinders to interventions with silk threads, thorns harvested from her backyard, and hand tools. Her sensibilities are shaped by the cultural frameworks of India and the material possibilities of California; in India, trees are regarded as wise, sentient beings, and in California, the DIY ethos, knowledge-sharing communities, advanced tools, and abundantly available reclaimed wood expanded the scale and ambition of her practice.

She has completed public art commissions for Palo Alto and Dublin, California, integrating community engagement, site specificity, and ecological reflection. Her work has been exhibited at the Montalvo Arts Center, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Sonoma County, Berkeley Art Center, Palo Alto Art Center, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, and internationally at the Museu de la Pell Cal Boyer in Spain. In 2025, an image of her work, etched onto nanofiche, was included in a lunar time capsule through a nonprofit–NASA collaboration.

Rana continues to build a practice rooted in curiosity, ecological attunement, and cross-cultural ways of sensing the world.