From an industrial park in Silicon Valley, Yoko Kubrick is summoning gods and monsters. When the door of her large, nondescript unit is rolled up, a world of beauty reveals itself: The sculptor makes monumental bronze and marble works—nine-foot-tall sculptures full of quiet surprises and subtle, erotic references to plant life and the ocean.

Born to a Japanese mother and Czechoslovakian father in the US territory of Guam, Kubrick grew up moving between Guam, Hawaii and San Francisco, spending summers with her grandparents in what is now Czechia. Sitting in a workspace overflowing with carving tools, small plaster studies and stacks of art and philosophy books, she credits her early inspiration to Hawaii: “There’s Indigenous sculpture everywhere, and the way the teachers in school talked about the mythology behind them was to tell these stories like they were real,” she says.

Storytelling is now central to Kubrick’s practice, with ideas for her work sparked sometimes by myths about ancient gods and goddesses and, at other times, soap operas. “Across cultures, when you boil it down, there are these common stories,” she says. “If you look at Will Smith and what happened with that slap? That’s what a lot of Greek mythology reads like: gossipy dramas between people. Rage, jealousy, revenge, not being able to control our emotions. They’re stories about human nature.”

Emma Silvers: From 2016 to 2019, you lived in Tuscany, where you learned to carve marble from third- and fourth-generation sculptors. What role does tradition play in your work? 

Yoko Kubrick: I love traditional materials. I lived in Pietrasanta, which has the highest population per capita of sculptors anywhere in the world. Some foundries go back multiple generations and so much of the sacred sculpture around the world is from there. These sculptors were so specialized—when they made angels, they would have one guy who did faces, one guy who did wings and feathers and another guy who just did the flowers. I actually met one of the last flower carvers in Pietrasanta. They stopped training them that way, because it doesn’t make sense economically; they all became generalists. I think it’s kind of sad that’s being lost. This guy, Franco Lombardi, you give him an air hammer and a chisel and he could carve roses blindfolded.

ES: Did that experience affect how you think about American art?

YK: Well, while I was doing my apprenticeship I also met sculptors from all over the world—Venezuela, Japan, the Czech Republic. I was the only American. We would sit and have these dinners and get into debates and it would often turn into an attack on Americans, like, “You guys don’t have any art history.” I would sit there and listen to this, until something dawned on me one day and I started pushing back: Maybe it’s a good thing we aren’t so tied to our history and culture the way Italians are. Most contemporary Italian artists are figurative; they’re very rooted in their tradition, and even when they do try to break away from it, it’s very difficult for them. I think that’s why a lot of the early abstract expressionists were children of immigrants—like Mark Rothko. They’re breaking away and starting new. Similar to how, in the Bay Area, because we’re not married to so much tradition, somebody can say, “I’m going to start an app where I rent out my air mattress, okay?” And we’re like, “Great!”