David Knorr is the star of the solo show “Biomorphic Conversation,” now on display at Five15Arts, in the Roosevelt Arts District in the heart of Phoenix, Arizona. Also on display with his stately and/or whimsical and/or gravity-defying sculptural works is the years of hard and focused work he has put into ceramic sculpting, an endeavor that involves a great deal of failures due to firing mishaps or glaze misbehavior or transport mishandling. The more than a dozen sizable works in the show have a flawlessness to them that belies these pitfalls of the medium.

One sculptural element that occurs in more than one piece is an array of I-beam shapes, small-scale girders in a short stack, curved possibly by the melting that occurs during firing. The curvature is a perfect example of the biomorphosis implied in the show’s title. The little girders are unsuitable for buildings but perfectly suited as support for a living, flexing thing. And the way that they stick out reminded me of the game Jenga, which involves pulling out miniature 4x4s from a tall stack of sucb without making the stack topple. This gave me the phrase “Agenda Jenga,” a happy accident that fit perfectly with the acrostic I was constructing. And the rest of the line, “fancy plain,” was another happy-accident perfect fit, which gave me a new oxymoron (I just love oxymorons!) In this case “fancy” means the same as it does in the phrase “flight of fancy.”

I hope Mr. Knorr will forgive my less-than-masterful portraiture. I’ve put his eyes too close together, and narrowed his broad, friendly face. But I think the expression works: an open, honest, convivial countenance, exuding well-earned confidence.

Distribute I-Beam-esques. OK.

Agenda Jenga, fancy plain.

Vorpal limblets two by two

Inch their way through Whimsy Moor

Demonstrating what whim’s for.

Note: “Vorpal” is a word invented by Lewis Carroll for his “Jabberwocky.” In the 70s the Vorpal Gallery mass-printed certain of M. C. Escher’s works. I and that gallery borrow Carroll’s magic.