Throughout the studio, Mabry has work in different stages of completion. One table contains small multiples that he has just completed for the Philadelphia gallery Cerealart: a pair of bronze skulls, one with an elephant nose attached to it by a bronze version of an elastic band, the other sporting a camel nose. He calls them the male and female, respectively, of some invented species. Each comes with a wood box of Mabry’s own design that doubles as a pedestal and shipping container.

A drafting table holds a powerful drawing of a mosaic-patterned skull done in green and gold pencil on a large Mylar sheet. The image based on a photograph of a Mixtec ceremonial skull from Mexico encrusted with jade and turquoise tiles (most likely to celebrate immortality or bestow supernatural powers), which Mabry traced meticulously and then colored by hand. “It’s almost as labor-intensive as putting on the stones originally,” he says, noting that his final touch will be to add Swarovski crystals to the drawing to create a “grille” on the skull’s teeth.

In the center of the studio stands a model of his newest sculpture: four curvy Moche vessels from Peru with stirrup handles and animal bodies (he sees them as “zoomorphic humans or anthropomorphic animals”) perched on top of boxy, Judd-inspired stools. Although the plan is to cast the work in bronze, at this stage it consists of cardboard, with blown-up photographs of the pots standing in for the sculptures to come

Often Mabry’s source photographs come from books. But he took these pictures himself, while visiting museums and ancient sites in Peru last summer. “I don’t think people realize how directly I work from primitive imagery,” he says. “People would probably recognize African sculpture, but the Moche imagery is ambiguous to a lot of people. It looks very contemporary—a lot of people probably think it comes from my imagination.”

This contemporary look helps to keep the Minimalist-Peruvian couplings, including the cleverly titled A Very Touching Moment (Cunning Linguist), from being too pat. The structure of this work “is yin and yang,” he says. “It’s not meant to be a hierarchy but a way of suspending the logic of time—bringing together cultures from the 1960s and the 1500s, before the colonization of Peru.” He calls his creation a “synchronicitous stew,” noting that bronze helps give the disparate elements equal weight.

Bronze is also convenient for Mabry, who prefers making a mold through the lost-wax method to firing unique ceramic works. “I only fire three to four one-of-a-kind pieces a year,” he says. “It’s very stressful because something can blow up or crack. A lot can happen.”

Mabry became versed in the properties of clay, including its volatility, when he was a teenager. He grew up in Napa, California, with parents who worked in the wine industry. His father, who also played in a reggae band, had mystical leanings, reading Carlos Castaneda to the young Mabry when the two went camping. The artist started working in ceramics as a junior in high school, when he made a geometric side table with a greenish black glaze that the teacher encouraged him to submit to the county fair. He won the blue ribbon for best in show and went on to apprentice with a local ceramist. His senior project was building a wooden kiln.

Mabry went on to study ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute, earning a BFA, before going for his MFA at UCLA, where he worked with such diverse artist-teachers as James Welling, John Baldessari and Paul McCarthy.

Did he experience prejudice against ceramics, regarded in the art world as a craft? “There was a certain amount of resistance,” he says very diplomatically. “But it only made me want to work harder.”

The result of this hard work has been witty, even juicy, conceptual work crafted from age-old materials like clay. In this respect, Mabry can be seen as part of a larger movement including such diverse artists as Ken Price, Grayson Perry, Kristen Morgin and Anna Sew Hoy, all of whom are making ceramics relevant to contemporary art, even though the medium itself is timeless. “It’s funny,” Mabry says. “The materials I typically work with—plastic, bronze, ceramics—are exactly the things that will survive us.”