“Castratos of Moon-Mash” is what Wallace Stevens said we’d be “without the sexual myth, the human revery or poem of death.” Without these ravaged facts of physical life, organic depths and regrets, constant re-becomings, separation, fear, dreams, bodies, and defeats, Stevens said, we’re not human, only neutered beings — Platonic abstractions without flesh. Since her breakout show at the Ten in One Gallery in 2001, the 44-year-old Jessica Jackson Hutchins has wrestled with the sexual myth, revery, poems of life and death, human dependency, motherhood, clustered flesh, and social loci made material. In the past, she’s created couches and chairs with pulpy masses, hypersecretions of ceramic and papier-mâché spilling over like a body fermenting, rising into flesh, cratering away. There are vases and vessels resting in forms, possibly puckered openings, voodoo ­protuberances, erotic shapes, shelters, micro­cosmic colosseums. She’s equally gaudy and hermetic, ragingly vulnerable but cloaked; at once abstract but always alluding to figuration. Another sculpture finds a painted ceramic shape kneeling into another and performing what looks like fellatio on another mass. She has talked about “the powerful language of objects,” and I see nonnarratives of skin, geologic and biological mergings, big things being broken down, little things becoming immense. She’s uneven and abstruse, but I think she’s among the best artists working in America today. Certainly with ceramics.

Clay reappeared in the art world about ten years ago. Long disparaged as a craft material, it was — like the demeaned paper silhouette that Kara Walker excavated in the early 1990s — something artists turned to in reaction to the processed, slick Jeff Koons–Damien Hirst movement toward jobbing art out to production teams. Clay represented a way to retake ancient territory and techniques and redefine skill with less expensive, labor-intensive, malleable material that takes on aspects of the body. Unlike the navel-gazing, marketable Zombie Formalists, who have also defined themselves by their unslickness, artists who turned to clay and papier-mâché weren’t making tame-looking art about art. Not only does worked clay show the traces of its making; it’s a tremendous support for painting, twisted, smooth, shaped, with insides and outsides, battered, eternally hard but always liquid-looking. Surprises of glazing are built in, the way surprise is built into painting. Women instinctively understood clay as unprotected territory, as they’d seen photography in the early 1980s — something no one cared about, and thus available. Hutchins, Huma Bhabha, Sterling Ruby, Shio Kusaka, Sarah Lucas, and others have made ceramics almost as ubiquitous in galleries as painting and sculpture. Glazed clay is so sexy that it’s become a gateway material for other “lesser” processes, like weaving and embroidery.