ART : Being True to Form : Ingrid Lilligren’s work conveys the solidity and emotionality inherent in the female figure.

Ceramic artist Ingrid Lilligren believes it is important for her, as a woman artist, to deal with the female figure.

“The discipline of drawing the figure is an old one in art. I would like to expand the understanding of the figure and its range of meanings in art, to bring a different perspective,” Lilligren said. “I want to investigate who I am as a woman in this culture and who I am as a person; and in this culture, I cannot separate the two.”

“Continuity: A Five Year Survey,” a show of Lilligren’s sculpture, prints and drawings on view at Pierce College Art Gallery, confirms that she is fulfilling her self-imposed obligations.

“The heavy, stately quality of her figure forms reminds me of the Earth. That seems to say something about being a woman, a base of solidity,” said Joan Kahn, the gallery curator. “But emotional and sensual qualities are also present at the same moment. I find that duality interesting.”

Twelve large ceramic figures populate the room, many of them resting on the floor rather than on pedestals.

“I wanted to put them in the realm of the viewer,” Lilligren said. “The size gives you an experience of them in your own dimension.”

The chunky, playful shape of “Orange Hugger” and the question-mark form of the top of “Blue/Red Sniffer” appeal to viewers’ senses of touch and smell.

“Everybody touches them,” Lilligren said. “I designed the pieces with that in mind. I want to celebrate the sensory world.

“I think that memory is activated by smell. I’m interested in linking experience and memory. The experience of being physically involved with the pieces will be taken away as a memory, as will the visual memory and any associations that are called up.”

Two more recent figures, “Tatu,” which is the French world for armadillo, and “Torus,” a term from biology that refers to the point where things connect, are more explicitly female in nature. So is “Paramorph,” which means neither plant nor animal. All three sculptures reflect Lilligren’s belief that human beings are not separate from nature, but a part of it.

For Lilligren, the branches hold anthropomorphic qualities, and constitute another of her explorations of the figure. Prints such as “Leaven of Regret I” and “Leaven of Regret II,” which also contain a crouching, obviously female figure, are “an interior, more subjective musing on my part,” on the dichotomy of our society’s wondrous ability to create great systems of logic, medicine and literature, and at the same time exorbitantly waste human life and materials, she said.

The prints are more formal studies of the “play between stillness and movement, tension and relaxation, balance and imbalance,” Lilligren said.

“It would be nice to think that at some point the body could be appreciated not as an object . . . if what would be considered beautiful is the deep beauty connected to meaning instead of the dictionary definition of disinterested appreciation.”

Where and When Exhibit: Ingrid Lilligren’s “Continuity: A Five Year Survey.” Location: Pierce College Art Gallery, 6201 Winnetka Ave., Woodland Hills.

Hours: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 6 to 9 p.m. Tuesday evenings through Dec. 17. Lecture and reception: A “Meet the Artist” lecture and reception begins at 2 p.m. Sunday to benefit the Foundation for Pierce College. Cost is $15. For reservations and information, call (818) 703-0826. Call: (818) 719-6498.