Clay is elemental. Ancient. Intimately connected with humanity’s development. It is the stuff of creation myths, from Mesopotamian to Mesoamerican. Gods mold clay and animate it with the breath of life. Meaghan Gates’ sculptures seem to embrace this lineage, embodying a vitality that makes them feel like living, breathing entities. Their surfaces ripple and curl, as if caught in the process of organic growth, frozen mid-transformation.

Gates earned her BFA from California State University, Chico, and her MFA from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth before moving to Utah to teach ceramics at Utah Tech University. Her ceramic sculptures, which appear to have emerged from the depths of the ocean, seem out of place at the St. George Art Museum, deep in the heart of the Utah desert—but wonderfully so.

The tension between movement and stillness is at play in her work, reinforcing the idea of clay as something dynamic rather than static. Pierced with holes, coiled with sinewy tendrils, and adorned with cell-like textures, her pieces suggest both microscopic and macroscopic life—spanning from the smallest biological structures to vast reef systems. They are creatures of both land and sea, forms that might have been shaped by water but now rest in the arid expanse of the desert.

Gates’ intricate biomorphic forms recall coral, sea sponges, and otherworldly organisms, yet they are not direct imitations of nature. Instead, they exist in a liminal space between the real and the imagined, coaxed into being from the raw earth. Gates calls her process intuitive, led by “aha” moments—bursts of creative insight that guide the formation of her sculptures. “Everything here is inspired by nature—not direct replicas of things I see in nature, but cool details and anatomical structures that I find inspiring,” she has explained. “I put them together in forms that look familiar but aren’t exactly like anything.”

Meaghan Gates: Fluid States, St. George Art Museum, St. George, through Mar. 8.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.