About US
Art Where Life Happens
Contemplative sculpture designed in Kamakura, Japan — for the quiet corners of everyday life.
"I don't make art for galleries anymore. I make art for the 6 AM moment when you're half-awake, making coffee, and your eyes land on something that reminds you who you are."Ava Mitchell, Founder & Artist
The Artist
Ava Mitchell
Decoava began the way most honest things begin — not with a plan, but with a feeling that refused to stay shapeless.
Ava Mitchell is a sculptor, trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale School of Art, who spent over a decade exhibiting in New York galleries. Her work was praised as meditative and restrained. By every external measure, she had arrived. And yet, something essential had gone quiet inside her.
In 2016, when her husband David received an architectural commission in Tokyo, Ava saw it as more than a relocation. It was a chance to listen to that quiet. The family moved to Japan — first to Tokyo, then to the coastal city of Kamakura, where they settled in a restored traditional wooden house with a moss garden and a studio flooded with morning light.
The Four Years of Silence
Unlearning
In Kamakura, Ava made a decision that surprised everyone — including herself. She stopped making art. For four full years, she did not sculpt, did not exhibit, did not sell. She calls this period The Four Years of Silence, and she speaks of it not with regret, but with gratitude.
She practiced seated meditation at Engaku-ji Temple most mornings. She walked for hours along Yuigahama Beach, through bamboo groves and mountain trails — what she calls "sketching with my feet." She studied under a ceramics master named Yamamoto-sensei, a man who had spent fifty years making tea bowls, one at a time, each one meant to serve a single purpose.
From him, she learned the sentence that would rebuild her entire practice: "Don't sculpt when your hands want to. Sculpt when the clay is ready."
The silence was not emptiness. It was an unlearning — a slow, deliberate stripping away of everything the art world had told her sculpture should be, so she could discover what it could be.
"My mother wasn't an artist. But the small sculpture she made in a community pottery class held more truth than anything I showed in fifteen years of galleries."Ava Mitchell
The Catalyst
A Small Sculpture on a Kitchen Counter
In early 2022, Ava's mother Margaret passed away. Sorting through her mother's modest home in Vermont, Ava found no fine art on the walls — but every room held small, quiet objects radiating with meaning. A smooth pebble from a honeymoon beach. A seashell kept for decades. And a rough clay sculpture of two figures embracing, made in a community pottery class. It was clumsy, lopsided, and the most powerful sculpture Ava had ever held.
She brought it back to Kamakura and placed it on the kitchen counter — the spot where she makes matcha every morning. And every morning, when she looked at it, her mother was there.
That autumn, watching her daughter Clara read on the wooden veranda in the October light, Ava felt something she had not felt in four years — a form, arriving uninvited. She walked into her studio, picked up clay, and sculpted for six hours without stopping. That piece became INFINITE, the abstract family sculpture that was Decoava's first creation.
Philosophy
Contemplative Minimalism
Ava's work lives at the intersection of three traditions — drawing emotional truth from each while belonging fully to none.
American Minimalism
The conviction that less is not a limitation, but a liberation. Pure forms stripped of ornament, revealing what was always there beneath the surface.
Japanese Wabi-Sabi
The beauty of imperfection, impermanence, and the meaningful presence of negative space — ma: the emptiness that holds everything.
Emotional Honesty
Every sculpture begins with a feeling, not an idea. A piece should make you feel something before you understand it — and perhaps you never need to understand it at all.
The Process
Designed in Kamakura, Handcrafted by Master Artisans
Every Decoava sculpture passes through six stages. Ava personally guides each piece from first observation to final naming.
Observation
Weeks of walking, meditating, and watching. Ava waits for what she calls "gravity" — the moment a feeling becomes heavy enough to need a form. She carries a small notebook everywhere, writing fragments in English and Japanese. No sketching yet. Only attention.
Sketching
Charcoal on paper. Always by hand, never digital. Thirty to fifty rough sketches exploring the form from every angle, taped to the studio wall and lived with for days — until one "keeps looking back at her."
Clay Modeling
Sculpted by hand in the early morning hours, before the world has opinions. Ava creates five to seven versions of each piece, then keeps only the one that feels as though it has stopped needing anything more.
Digital Refinement
The clay master is 3D-scanned, then refined — curves adjusted by fractions of a millimeter. Ava views this stage as translating from the language of hands to a language that can be shared.
Artisan Production
Each piece is hand-cast, hand-sanded, and hand-finished in small batches by dedicated artisan partners — using a proprietary cast stone resin blending natural marble powder with eco-friendly resin. No two pieces are perfectly identical.
The Naming
A piece is never named at the beginning. Ava holds the first finished sample in the late afternoon light, turns it over, closes her eyes, and waits for the piece to tell her its name. The name is the last act of creation — the moment a sculpture stops being hers and begins belonging to everyone.
Material
Cast Stone Resin
A proprietary blend of natural marble powder and eco-friendly resin, formulated to Ava's specifications. Each piece carries the weight, coolness, and tactile beauty of carved stone — made to be touched, held, and lived with for generations.
The Mission
Art Doesn't Belong Behind Glass
It belongs on kitchen counters, bedside tables, and the quiet corners of bookshelves. In the spaces you inhabit every day — encountered not during a curated museum visit, but during the ordinary, unremarkable, infinitely precious moments of daily life.
Every Decoava sculpture is a small, quiet monument to something that happened in your life — or something you hope will happen.