"Repetitions: Wasp Ledges" (2003) pays homage to the utilitarian roots of her art, with its thrown, thin-walled bowls on ledge supports, each bowl containing drawn marks and small, mysterious objects.

Winokur tells us, and the pieces immediately communicate, that her work is influenced by the landscapes she has experienced in her travels: "the Earth itself, particularly cliffs, ledges, crevices and canyons; the effects of wind, earthquakes and other natural phenomena such as geological 'shifts' and 'rifts.' "

Vast expanses of rock, ice and soil are suggested in, for example, the 2003 piece "Glacier I (Alaskan Memory)."

However, she also tells us that she is attracted to porcelain not for its delicacy but for its sensuality.

What results in her work is far more complex, richer and deeper and more than merely terrain seen from above. Her work celebrates the marriage of a highly developed, delicate tactile sensibility with tough, mysterious chthonic power, mediated by a kind of astringent, dreamtime sexuality.

Silky-smooth white surfaces encounter wrinkled, organic, almost pahoehoe lava, black ice or coal-like forms, the geological wrestling with the biological, geometric with the organic.

Occasionally a smooth surface is lightly caressed with a subtle suggestion of a surveyor's measuring line, dotted demarcations, compass-drawn measuring points, lead-pencil-thin arrows.

Understated colors derived from metallic sulfates, chlorides, engobes (liquid clay slips) and stains evoke not only the pooling of water but also tantalizing suggestions of living, pulsating matter lurking in the earth's nether regions.

This shibui-like sensibility arises from a maturity, complexity, history and patina that only time can bring — like a fine vintage wine.

The primitive, prehistoric markings on the surfaces — lines and scratches that resemble ancient markings — echo not only the man-made scarring of the earth's surface — plowed fields, roads and fences — but also the fierce totemic tattoos that warriors throughout history have used to both adorn as well as terrorize.

Gyongy Laky's "Desert Edge" (2001) is eucalyptus-twig storm debris assembled with deck screws. David C. Darmer • Special to The Advertiser

"Segments Erraticus," a 1999 piece fashioned of 12 U-shaped sections, evokes not only slices of an elongated geode, with its smooth sides and irregular interiors, but also the vertebrae bones and marrow of some mythic dinosaur.

Its very title references multiple layers of meaning: wandering about without a fixed destination; an eccentric who deviates from commonly accepted opinions; a rogue; boulders that have been carried away by natural forces; loose stones on the earth's surface; drift or rock debris transported and deposited by an icy glacier.

The large-scale "White Butte," a 2003 work, is a ragged monolith tearing through an undulating plain of smooth mosaic tile forms, hinting at the rending of human flesh in the throes of birth or the sexual act.

It also demonstrates her slab method technique of rolling out and shaping the clay into pieces that are assembled together in the final work.

A memory of dreamscapes brimming with pulsating, organic energies: Winokur's exhibition hauntingly lingers long after first sight.

Also on display

A selection of the museum's clay, glass, wood, metal and fiber works is featured in this two-floor gallery exhibition, including many recent acquisitions and works that have not been shown either recently or at all.

The show both celebrates the creativity of the many artists on display and pays tribute to the Museum's many generous donors of works of art and funds for acquisitions.

On view now is the show's second rotation, designed so as to expose a maximum number of pieces throughout the run.

The museum also has an impressive collection of turned wood objects, evidenced by the works of some of Hawai'i's best-known wood artists, including Derek Bencomo, Robert Hamada, Ron Kent, Michael Lee and Jack Straka.

The exhibition burns brightly on the top floor gallery but somewhat loses its luster in the ground floor space, both because the lower gallery space itself is difficult to effectively design and the selected pieces simply do not astonish and surprise as the upper gallery pieces do.

Sixteen years after the Museum first opened, its fine collection of contemporary ceramics and ceramic sculptures is indeed remarkable.

Stephen Destaebler's "Standing Woman with Open Heart," a richly arresting 1978 color-stained porcelain and stoneware sculpture, with its use of similar materials in the service of a related but far different aesthetic sensibility, skillfully serves as an effective bridge, as the first piece a viewer encounters after the Winokur show.

Among the strongest ceramic pieces being shown for the first time is American artist Daisy Youngblood's 1990 "Monkey with Leg Out," a haunting low-fired clay sculpture that suggests dialectically ambiguous messages of punning humor and laboratory animal mutilation, while maintaining a wondrous command of form, material and technique.

Equally striking in an extremely unusual medium is Gyongy Laky's 2001 "Desert Edge," eucalyptus-twig storm debris assembled with deck screws into a fabricated bowl form.

Jay Musler's 1992 oil and acrylic on glass "Architectural Bowl" — although hardly subtle in form — fairly glows with an inviting red richness, evoking the loveliest aspects of a nighttime metropolis skyline.

Judy Fox's 1995 casein on terracotta "Courtesan" deliciously demonstrates all that a figurative ceramic sculpture can be: assured, monumental, sensitive and erotic, wrapped in a joyous mantle of good-humored whimsy.