In our spectral contemplation a life other than our own, made up of ourselves and of something else, forms and disintegrates; and the sleeper—­ not wholly aware, not quite unconscious—­ catches a glimpse of these strange forms of animal life, these extraordinary vegetations, these pallid beings, ghastly or smiling, these larvae, these masks, these faces, these hydras, these confusions, this moonlight without a moon, these dark decompositions of wonder, these growths and shrinkings in a dense obscurity, these floating forms in the shadows, all this mystery that we call dreaming and that in fact is the approach of an invisible reality. The dream world is the aquarium of night.

—Victor Hugo [The Toilers of the Sea, 1866, pp. 82–­ 83]
[Les Travailleurs de la mer (Paris: Hugues, 1883)]

Eva Zethraeus (Swedish, b. 1971) is a ceramic artist based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Working primarily in porcelain, she creates exquisite and tenuous biomorphic sculptures inspired by marine life, Japanese Zen Buddhist gardens, and the extraordinary relation of viruses to our own organisms. Zethraeus’ works examine the phenomena of life cycles and replication with an eye for the unpredictable variances that occur. They are not only wholly realized individual objects, but also suggest the greater context of an immersive environment, the Umwelt within which an organism lives and perceives its actions. Within this imaginary, she constructs intricate forms that encapsulate the complex manner in which organisms grow and evolve. Each individual component of a piece is hand-thrown; the work is then assembled and subsequently undergoes a number of glazings and firings to achieve its finished state. Zethraeus, herself deeply rooted in the field of ceramics and its technical demands, describes her approach to structure: “My sculptures are the result of an ongoing research of form and the complicated nature of the ceramic process. They connect to the fragile interdependencies that structure living systems.”

Drawing on the logic of landscape and the taxonomies of natural spaces, Zethraeus’ porcelain sculptures could be said to inhabit a garden of forking paths. Their spiraling and elongated arms bifurcate, coil, and extend into space as though imbued with a wandering consciousness. Each of her intricately modeled creations, often gathering small wheel-thrown elements together in radial symmetry around a central sphere, are formed from alternately sinuous, helical, bulbous, and tendrillar appendages. Their confusion of limbs and tendrils extend into space, mirroring familiar somatic gestures of the body. As all organisms are more than the sum of their parts, so these sculptures, built piecemeal on the pottery wheel and adhered into a single form with care and clay slip, exhibit a collective capacity for dynamism en masse; visually, they seem to move in tandem, swaying and drifting. They resemble the category of organisms that relies primarily on tactile stimuli, reacting to sensory feedback from haptic processes to understand their surroundings. As such, Zethraeus draws a link long understood to exist in linguistics between prehension — touching, holding, and grasping — and comprehension. Images might lie, but touch speaks to directly perceived reality.