Our world is defined by forms and the placement of these forms. Surrounding and connecting these forms is an ether of ideas, meanings, language and associations. Though invisible, it is this ether which shapes the forms of our world and guides our perceptions of them. To make art, and particularly sculpture, is to immerse oneself directly into this scenario in which formlessness decrees form and the symbiosis of container and contained reigns paramount.

Arlene Shechet's recent sculptures may first appear to be descended from a school of organic abstraction that successfully spans Surrealism, Expressionism and Minimalism. The artist's program, however, is more complex than the simple manipulation of materials for physical and visual effect. Upon closer inspection and with the luxury of time, Shechet's sculptures reveal themselves to be both eloquent and redolent, heavily weighted with associations, maximal in tendency through shape, surface treatment and presentation.

Shechet's works manage to be animal, vegetable and mineral simultaneously. Their resemblances can be found in diverse corners of the natural and civilized worlds. While organ tissues and sea creatures come to mind, the sculptures hold dearly to the traditions of Chinese scholars' rocks and Japanese netsuke as well. In their premeditated assurance to embrace both contradiction and complexity they mimic the 18th Century French fashion for outfitting Oriental ceramics in gilded Rococo mounts. Their pregnant silence is that of a tiny shard of moon rock brought back from an Apollo mission and now entombed in a lighted vitrine at the Smithsonian Institution. The ghosts of Kryptonite, malignant tumours, subterranean deposits, mushroom clouds, Thracian gold cups, Etruscan funeral statuary, caterpillar larvae, and frozen breath also haunt these works.

Shechet's works invert function, presenting semblances of use in neutered forms. Hollow, pierced and pustuled, the sculptures both contain and occupy space, inhale and exhale, cringe and drool. Their material solidity is at odds with an appearance of inflated lightness while the metallic sheen of their glazed surfaces confounds one's reading of an almost sexual corporeality. As with her previous works which exploited figurative Buddhas and architectural Stupas, Shechet's abstract art parades an ambivalence towards cultural contexts, historical moorings and even gender specifics.

To make sculpture is to investigate phenomena as well as materials and forms. Matter is shaped not only by hands and tools but also by sensations and emotions, consciousness and social constructions. Shechet's sculptures seem to be partially realized by forces beyond her control, ectoplasms emanating from the body of a spiritualist medium. The artist's spiritualism accommodates all manner of extremes: the sacred and the secular, religion and apostasy, science and magic, beauty and horror. Her sculptures proudly colonize the grey areas between disciplines, occupying the interstitial spaces between experience and thought, being and nothingness. Successful art can usually be described as indescribable. Shechet's sculptures lay witness to our present consciousness, entangled in intricacies both individual and collective.

Peter Nagy is the director of Gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi.