Spend even a few minutes in Miriam Wosk's studio and you'll be astonished by the sheer abundance that you find there. It starts with the materials that she works with: rolling paint tables crowded with countless tubes and jars of color, all perfectly arranged…a bin replete with dozens of rolls of exotic wallpapers, each with an end popped out to reveal its pattern…maps, anatomical and botanical etchings, illustrations…trays and drawers everywhere filled with carefully filed beads and glittering sequins…shelves filled with neatly sorted jars of glue and medium…stacks of her meticulously assembled scrapbooks, each page a visual and intellectual journey through centuries of art, design, and printed texts of human thought: an artist's musings on the images and ideas she brings together in the process of her work.

And, of course, an abundance of the artist's work, from an expansive wall of her "Rorschach" watercolors to a row of the large-scale, richly textured collage paintings that she creates using all those materials, selected with such a discriminating eye--torn fragments of wallpaper and wall charts, scientific illustrations, a glitter of sequins and crystals, threads and fabrics, along with the multifarious painted elements of her own imagination; and another of works still in progress--each, in itself, an abundant and growing assemblage of images. We sense that a good part of Wosk's aesthetic sensibility is the collector in her, the jackdaw, whose unabashed passion for things of beauty that inspire her--everything from high art to kitsch, the mundane to the outrageous and bizarre--leads her on a continuing, restless search for what she needs to work with, whether it be a simple pair of scissors or a scientific print from an antique treatise on the inner workings of the human body.

But let's be clear: these objects from the material world that Wosk brings together so assiduously are not collected for their intrinsic value. What she is looking for in the world out there, we sense, is in part a kind of sonar reading on the nature of the universe; and in part the echo and image of an inner life that she pursues with equal vigor--akin, perhaps, to what the poet T. S. Eliot described as the "objective correlative" that conflates the outer/material and inner/spiritual in a complete, intuitively understandable, and wholly satisfying way. Integrated in an artwork, they form an infinite number of infinitely complex reflections of the artist's psyche in relation to the cosmos; or perhaps, to use a more accurate, if more difficult word, her soul.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Wosk's work is its vulnerability; I’m tempted to say its naiveté, its innocence. In the first place, to make the kind of work she does in an art world that, since World War II, has touted savvy, art-smart sophistication as a primary value, it's an almost deliberate affront to indulge delightedly in pattern, ornamentation, and self-exploration as she does--with clear intention. Wosk's work, in a word, is anything but "cool." She puts herself out there in the dedicated pursuit of her individual vision, without regard for current trends or fashions.

More important still, however--and vastly more moving--is its vulnerability on the intimate and personal level. In her collages, Wosk seems to open herself, literally, to the penetrating eye. And the sexual subtext here is not a casual one. There is something decidedly carnal about all her work. Those Rorschach paintings--which she regards as being perhaps the least complex of her work--are, as I see them, wounded self-revelations, barely mediated openings of the body-mind, an immediate rendering of innermost self onto a sheet of paper. And the luscious surfaces of a more fully worked painting like the ambitiously titled "Time, Space, Cosmology, and Life," to which she devoted two years of constant work, are as replete with sensual appeal, with all their beads and jeweled glitter, as a richly ornamented, breathing human body. Throughout, her use of body images--opened out, laid bare, sometimes skeletal, sometimes stripped of flesh to reveal the underlying muscle structure, or reduced to nothing more than a delicate network of exposed nerves--reminds us urgently of the curious predicament of the experience of being inside the human body we're each loaned for the brief span of our life.

If her constant theme is the marvelous abundance of life in all its forms, whether human or animal, biological or botanical, Wosk reminds us of that school of Eastern thought which holds that everything in life leads to, or embraces, its opposite. Her delight in beauty in all its forms is rendered all the more poignant for the acknowledgement of pain that inevitably partners it. By the same token, her joie de vie, her lust for life in all its glorious manifestations, has its counterpart in the ubiquitous evocation of shades of death: memento mori. In this respect, her work recalls the sensibility of the Baroque period in art and literature. I think particularly of the poets Eliot famously called "metaphysical,” who combined the elaborate ornamentation of style and language with the darker themes of sexuality and mortality. They spoke of the flowering of human love in the same breath as decadence and decay, and of all physical reality as an expression of the divine.

These are grand themes, of course, and Wosk’s significant achievement is to be able to treat them familiarly, without pretension, on an intimate and personal scale that allows us to experience them without being preached at or hectored. Wosk’s strategy is seduction. Abundance is her medium. She approaches even something as grandiose as the cosmos itself on these intimate terms, identifying its vast complexity in the minutest of details. She invites us to consider, in her artwork, what both science and spirituality teach us: that everything is interdependent, that the simple beating of a butterfly’s wing sends ripples of energy throughout the universe. Her quest above all is for the ultimate truth of this understanding, made manifest both in the beauty of the physical world and in the creative process of the artist. It’s all a voyage of discovery and revelation.

• Peter Clothier

Peter Clothier is a poet and novelist who also writes about art and artists for national journals. In addition to his two novels and scores of reviews and articles in international magazines over the past three decades, he is author of the monograph David Hockney in the Abbeville Modern Masters Series and a memoir, While I Am Not Afraid. His current passion is his daily weblog, “The Bush Diaries.” He lives in Los Angeles, California.