Recent Work
Ian Husting is a Washington, D.C.–based contemporary artist exploring rupture, shelter, and renewal through illuminated mixed-media sculpture.
Afterlight (2026)
What holds when a home breaks?
Afterlight is a manifestation of both a deeply personal and broadly universal disruption of the meaning of home.
I combine everyday home-building materials (wood, plaster, and paint) with modern technologies (backlit film and embedded LED lighting) to produce dark, worn dwellings that protect small but luminous vignettes of life and imagination. Each sculptural work contains a series of glowing, recessed ‘windows’ warmly backlit, reminiscent of a fireplace. Inside each cavern resides one of more than fifty hand-drawn illustrations in ink and graphite.
The sequence is intentional: three wall reliefs that sit with harm, followed by three freestanding works that reach for regrowth.
In the wall works, buried beneath cold, deteriorating structures, viewers may see a mother clutching her child, organic life being stamped out, and seeds of new beginnings taking shape. In the floor works—branching, clustering, taking root—new and imagined worlds take shape with depictions of utopian mountainscapes and liminal forms.
Artist statement
Through an interplay of techniques, including drawing, painting, sculpture, and light, I create landscapes and narratives that exist between clarity and uncertainty. These are places of tension and tenderness, places where light meets shadow, and fragility reveals its own kind of strength.
My creative practice has been shaped by the shifting terrain of family and community; by the birth of my child, deep personal loss, and the broader sense of uncertainty that defines our world as global threats dictate the survival of humanity.
These experiences require me to ask: how do we live through grief without losing our capacity for wonder? How do we rebuild when everything feels uncertain?
Each piece is both a question and a gesture toward possibility; a search for connection, healing, and glimpses of a gentler future.