Lauren Mabry plumbs utility and color at Belger Crane Yard Studios

“Impulsive ceramist” sounds like an oxymoron. It’s hard to imagine improvisation figuring into such a painstaking, multistage endeavor, in the same way it’s hard to imagine ancient scribes idly chiseling song lyrics into stone tablets.

At Belger Crane Yard Studios, though, Lauren Mabry’s roomy Passages suggests just that kind of offhanded ease. In a show that expands our collective imagination, she employs thin drizzles and chalky color fields with glazes that come across almost like doodles. The colors flow and coalesce like free-form jazz.

Many of Mabry’s sculptures share the same utilitarian title (“Cylinder” or “Pipe Form” appear a few times), underscoring that we’re seeing variations on a theme. That theme? A sort of indulgent erraticism, as industrial forms (ceramic pipes) and humble materials (toothy earthenware) become canvases for energetic expression.

Mabry’s tallest sculptures, are also her most frenetic. The two called “Pipe Composition” stretch the artist’s abstract gashes across towering cylinders, each fused from three sections of industrial ceramic pipe. The rough edges where the sections meet form a sort of triptych; graffiti drips and soft color fields stop abruptly at their borders, giving each section its own style and dominant palette.

The shorter of the two is rife with tension and kinetic energy. Aggressive blood-red smears find a strange harmony with a dreamy blue horizon. In a gravity-defying stunt, paint drips upward in one section, downward in another. The effect evokes Mabry’s process while thrusting us into a cartoonish Wonderland.

But the works that made me look the longest were simpler. Mabry’s two “Spilling Pipes” draw us inside the cylinders, where competing colors funnel out of their frames to pool on the ground. If you’ve ever rinsed out a paint tray, you’ll recognize the pattern — Mabry perfectly captures the kinetic mingling of pigments spilling down a drain. A deliberately patchy glaze adds texture to the pipe exterior, a dulled shell for the streaked symphony within.

Instead of throwing, Mabry has fused many of these pieces from once-functional sections of ceramic pipe. Their utilitarian past seems crucial to her practice, transforming workaday structures into assertively decorative pieces. Nowhere is that tension better exploited than in the vibrant green “Pipe Form,” which is simultaneously garish and elegant in its evocations. The piece is unique among Mabry’s offerings in its color consistency and its continuous, wrap-around pattern. Peacock colors — lacy fields of green striped with glittering bronze and blue glaze — add an aggressive edge.

Mabry repurposes that same glimmering bronze in another, messier “Pipe Form.” In its new context (the inside of a variegated, thrown pipe), the glitter takes on a corrosive vibe, evoking rust instead of a peacock’s preen. Although the pipe’s exterior is less surprising — an even wash of glaze gives the base a laminated feel — the rough interior is stunning, a subtle nod to Mabry’s industrial inspirations.

Cylinders make fertile canvases for the artist, allowing her to create progressive “scenes” of color. Speckled chaos fades to balanced design and then to chaos once again. These are Grecian urns for the modern admirer, fussy curves blunted, representation largely eschewed. Pipes may be passages, but from the outside they’re smooth and impenetrable, leaving us to stalk around in punishing circles as we hunt for a way in. In Mabry’s world, there’s always something new around the (U-)bend.

Editor’s note: This review has been altered online to reflect a correction. A work originally identified as one of Mabry’s “Pipe Composition” sculptures is by Don Reitz and is not part of Mabry’s exhibition.