Idiosyncratic sculptures by a half-dozen artists make for a striking new show at the Northern Clay Center. Each artist got a McKnight fellowship within the past three years to pursue special projects, many of them completed during residencies at the Clay Center's headquarters at 2424 E. Franklin Av. in Minneapolis. Mike Norman One of the region's most talented fabulists, Norman has a long history of sculpting earthenware into fanciful animals, especially dogs, horses and bunnies on epic voyages in ceramic boats. His are rude and often manic creatures blessed with fierce energy, lusty spirits and tender hearts. Here he taps into Greek mythology and Chinese imagery to create a galaxy of magical horses soaring over landscapes populated by gaucho bunnies. See, for instance, his blue-horse tribute to German expressionist painter Franz Marc. Or "Pegasus," a classical pony whose graceful blue wings are made of aluminum.

The McKnight fellowship enabled Norman to take a break from the bread-and-butter work of production pottery and to experiment with new materials, most notably beeswax. Called "Last Night I Dreamt," the beeswax sculpture features a handsome blue ceramic horse standing on a metal grid coated with honey. Slabs of white honeycomb flank the beast, touching at spots like fragile buttresses. Norman evidently engaged the bees' help by placing the sculpture in a hive where the bees made it an armature for their comb-building. The magical sculpture was inspired by an Antonio Machado poem about a dream of a beehive where "golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures."

Lisa Marie Barber Barber attributes the exuberant excess in her installations to the influence of Mexican folk art and baroque churches. That's a helpful explanation when trying to get a handle on her clutter of doll-like figures amid Seussian towers decked out in checkerboard patterns, psychedelic swirls and daffy headgear. But to my taste, her work is way too childishly self-indulgent and playschoolish.

John Utgaard Although they are only tabletop size, Utgaard's sculptures possess a strange monumentality, like skyscrapers in miniature. Think bonsai IDS Towers. Glazed in muted shades of turquoise, olive or wine, they are earthy minimalist shapes that typically erupt from rectangular ponds carved into irregularly shaped earthen basins. Narrow, window-like openings high up on the towers hint at surveillance. But these are very buttoned-down forms, monoliths that whisper of silence, exile and cunning.

Hide Sadohara Talk about strange. The show's catalog quotes ceramicist Hide Sadohara as saying, "I'm just doing knick-knack art, basically. I want my work to be as cliché as possible." Indeed his centerpiece is an installation featuring pigtailed twin girls, about 40 inches tall and vaguely Chinese in aspect, standing before a wall of American kitsch -- needlepoint ballerinas, dog paintings, cat drawings and so forth. Called "Memorial Tomb Cast," it appears to be Sadohara's coy criticism of China's famous ceramic tomb figures as ancient kitsch on a monumental scale. Twins are his other obsession, represented here by mutant "Siamese" twin rabbits, and bobble-head babies with adult visages studying a wall chart about reproduction. Sadohara is a remarkably clever and expressive carver. Not as eloquent as his idol, the Roman Baroque master Bernini, but really good, nevertheless.

Joseph Kress Kress, who committed suicide this past spring, was a sculptor whose forms are a perfect balance of sensuality and intellect. An extraordinary colorist, he sheathed his cups, vases and sculptural teapots in mottled gold and earthy rust, clear green and rich cobalt. Only nominally functional, his work consists of cones and columns that he cut and combined into remarkably complex shapes. Peer into one of his vases and you discover something akin to a cross-section of the human heart, a well of beautifully glazed chambers and valves intersecting at impossibly intricate angles.

In an eloquent catalog essay, Rob Silberman notes that the columns and ridges in Kress' work allude to the silos and plowed fields of his farm near Marshfield, Wis. His oft-repeated hourglass shapes reflect his obsession with the passage of time over seasons and millennia. With their double columns flanking a conical bowl, his cups also echo the way the human torso flares above the legs, or breasts swell between arms. In their delicate geometries, there is a sacerdotal quality to Kress' handsome forms -- as if, like the communion cups of Christian ritual, they were made to hold not just water or wine but the breath of life itself.

John Lambert Trained first as a carpenter, Lambert applies his building skills to the construction of boxy X-shaped objects and 3D arrows that he assembles into free-standing walls, buttresses, and window friezes. Bisque fired or lightly glazed with matte gold hues, his handsome sculptures have an archaeological quality as if they are gigantic building blocks excavated from some ancient, sun-bleached ruin.

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431