In Bradley Sabin’s writhing, flourishing, incandescent ceramic sculpture, clay, made of earth itself, becomes partially familiarized in its resemblance to natural form, and yet remains strange, wild, threading a vigorous, sinuous line between plant and animal, male and female, skin and viscera, natural and human-made. These forms (antlers, pods, leaves, blossoming fruit, snakes) at once emphasize those dualities and at the same time facilitate relationship, between each other as they interweave and hybridize, but also between themselves and the viewer. The work grows and spreads, seemingly limitlessly, taking over everything as nature eventually does, as the artist has noted. Sabin cradles the edge of that inundation between wild and civilized in his work, and performs the alchemy needed to translate it into form.

Tantalizingly familiar and yet not, but neither fostering the discomfort of the uncanny, their repetition—thousands of flowers, a forest floor’s worth of leaves—are in fact marked with deliberate permutations of uniqueness, engendering a sense of vulnerability. They cultivate longing—for connection, for touch, for protection, but also the desire to provide for and to nourish. That is because each form is the product of an embrace, each smooth surface a soothing caress, each indentation the gentle pressure of a fingertip. And then, these cultivated shapes are lavishly drenched in glazes of such depth and complexity, whether sugary, milky, deeply glossy, or like molten metal, with color and texture reiterating their compositional relationships and then creating new ones. These are forms, literally, of nurture.