Leigh’s sculptures, in ceramic and bronze, are typically symmetrical and easy. They mix the figures and heads of Black girls with the kinds of jugs, bowls, spoons and cowrie shells, in addition to the repeated rhyming kinds of hooped skirts, upturned bells and braided hair cascading from heads.

Against the run of a lot fashionable sculpture, with its jagged edges and materials mash-ups, Leigh’s works are coherent and calm and wonderful to have a look at. Occasionally I discover them too placid, the kinds themselves predictable to the level of complacency. But in their presence, one’s respiration imperceptibly slows and deepens. Enlivened by subtleties of texture and shade, they’re surpassingly sensuous.

Leigh’s glazes are particularly ravishing. Their colours vary from deep, saturated yellow and royal blue to earthy browns and greens, matte black, shiny white and gleaming gold. Their surfaces can counsel a wealthy, opaque ganache one minute, a mild, translucent lemon-sugar glaze the subsequent.

With titles like “Sentinel” and “Sphinx,” Leigh’s bigger sculptures loom over you with the foursquare confidence of monuments. What do they commemorate? What or whom do they honor?

The reply will not be difficult. They monumentalize and make recognized the invisible, unwritten and traditionally underappreciated labor of Black girls. Not simply bodily labor however mental, too. They do that not with the committee-approved, kitsch-prone piety of public sculpture commissions, however with varieties of poetic self-awareness that induce deep reflection.

Leigh’s sculptures are themselves the outcome of lengthy and targeted labor. (She is helped by assistants in the studio, foundry and kiln.) Many are made not with potter’s wheels however a extra historical method: coiling ropes of clay into a circle, laying one coil on high of one other, then utilizing handheld instruments to easy out the corrugations.

The tiny rosettes Leigh typically makes use of for hair are hand-folded and -pinched by the 1000’s. Contemplating their creation, I believed of two passages in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” In the first, the novelist describes “the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a ‘sth’ when she misses the needle’s eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens. Nothing fierce or startling. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks.” Elsewhere, Morrison writes of early morning bread-making: “Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start that day’s serious work of beating back the past.”

But Leigh’s salutes to Black feminine labor are completely different from Morrison’s. They have a extra public-facing, even majestic side. Instead of “beating back the past” — an instinctive response to trauma — Leigh takes imagery stained with racism and colonialism and inverts its implications, transmuting baseness and disgrace into magnificence and energy.

Unexpectedly, the kinds of her sculptures can derive from hackneyed racist or colonialist tropes. “Last Garment,” for example, a life-size bronze sculpture of a girl standing in a reflective pool and bending over her work, relies on a late-Nineteenth-century memento {photograph} exhibiting a Jamaican girl bending to clean garments in a river. The picture was broadly circulated in Europe and used to lure vacationers to Jamaica in order that a sugar colony as soon as constructed on slavery may be seen as a tropical paradise populated with girls residing near nature.

Similarly, a number of of Leigh’s large, wide-skirted figures are in realizing dialogue with an Edward Weston {photograph} of a roadside cease in Mississippi transformed into a big “Mammy.”

At the Venice Biennale, Leigh erected a raffia facade on the neoclassical U.S. Pavilion, a constructing with robust overtones of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. She was impressed to take action by pictures of huts with thatched roofs offered in Paris at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition. (The ghosts of colonialism and nationalism are unattainable to disregard at the Biennale, which dates again to the Eighteen Nineties.)

Leigh’s big sculpture, “Satellite,” put in outdoors the ICA (simply because it had been put in in entrance of the U.S. Pavilion in Venice), echoes the kind of a conventional D’mba headdress of the Baga folks of Africa’s Guinea coast. Such headdresses have been historically used throughout rituals to speak with Baga ancestors. But examples of these and lots of of different African objects have been additionally despatched again to Paris by colonizers at the flip of the twentieth century, the place they impressed such fashionable artists as Matisse, Picasso and Giacometti.

Leigh is conscious of all these histories — American, European and African. Instead of undoing them, she co-opts them, presenting them in new, formidably self-possessed kinds that invite us to register and maybe reimagine truths about Black girls omitted by the historic archive.

In all this, Leigh has been deeply influenced by her buddy, the Columbia University educational Saidiya Hartman. Hartman is understood for advocating what she calls “critical fabulation,” her time period for a technique that responds to the silences and clean areas in historic archives by inviting artists, historians and critics to fill in the gaps, imagining not solely what was however what might need been. Her current e book, “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,” charts what she calls “a transformation of black intimate life” in New York and Philadelphia at the starting of the twentieth century. That transformation, she notes, was “the consequence of economic exclusion … racial enclosure and social dispossession.” But it was additionally “fueled by the vision of a future world and what might be.”

Leigh is equally in jimmying open the previous to mission ahead into extra hopeful futures. But it’s to her credit score that, while you spend time along with her work, it’s arduous to maintain in thoughts highflying ideas like “critical fabulation.”

Instead, her suavely pared-back poetry is animated extra by silences and smoothed-out hollows than by rhetoric or fiction, and it attracts you into a sort of sensitized trance. Leigh has created her world, as Hartman herself has written, “not by explaining anything, but … by a radical withholding that makes visible and palpable all that is held in reserve — all that power, love, brilliance, labor, and care. All that beauty.”

That so many of Leigh’s kinds are vessels is unquestionably not unintended. Vessels are hole. You can depart them empty or you possibly can fill them with issues. You could effectively wish to fill them with which means — however you should make them first. And the making turns into its personal sort of which means, rising from supplies, instruments, labor and aesthetic choices, each supposed and unintended.

I really feel sure that it’s this second sort of which means that issues most to Leigh. After all, if it didn’t, why would she trouble? Work and wonder each disarm rhetoric. Leigh’s sculptures, for all their eloquent ironies and historic damage, possess a easy, well-crafted loveliness that reaches deep inside you, enjoining assent.

Simone Leigh Through Sept. 4 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. icaboston.org.