Metaphors abound in the work of sculptor Stephen De Staebler, and an exhibition of De Staebler’s sculptures currently on display at the Snite Museum of Art does an excellent job of pulling all those metaphors together in a coherent, accessible way.

The exhibition consists of 11 ceramic sculptures on loan from Chicago’s Zolla/Lieberman Gallery and one bronze sculpture from the Snite’s permanent collection. The bronze waits for visitors in the museum’s atrium, while the remainder of the sculptures are tucked in the Mestrovic Studio gallery. There is, also, another of De Staebler’s sculptures in the museum’s permanent collection that visitors can include in their visit to the exhibition; “Figure Column IX,” a piece intended to commemorate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, sits upstairs.

Although the Snite’s bronze sculpture, “Single Winged Figure on Plinth,” is made of a different material than all of the other works, it clearly has its origin in clay, allowing it to fit cleanly into the system of metaphors that give meaning to De Staebler’s work. The metaphors revolve, in an unsurprising way, around the ideas of earth, creation, commemoration and permanence, and all these ideas are linked to the aspirations of humanity via the human forms embedded in the pieces.

First, there is the metaphor of earth, and it’s an easy one to sort out. The sculptures are made of clay, and De Staebler makes no attempt to disguise the material. In fact, he celebrates the material by leaving it minimally refined, almost raw. The clay is fired but unglazed, and it seems barely removed from mud, as if it was simply dredged up straight from the ground and slapped onto an armature. Short of carving a sculpture directly from the ground, it would be difficult give a work a much more direct connection to the earth.

Then there’s the metaphor of creation. There is, of course, the biblical connection — most of us are going to be reminded immediately of the Judeo-Christian clay-based origin of mankind — but there’s more to it than that. The marks of De Staebler’s tools and hands are clearly visible in all the sculptures; we can’t ignore the role of the artist as creator even if we try. Even the minimal processing of the material — the simple act of firing the clay — is an act of creation; it transforms the clay from fragile, ephemeral mud into something strong and semi-permanent.

Finally, there’s the metaphor of architecture. Many of the sculptures make explicit reference to architecture — four “Figure Column” sculptures are in the exhibition, and the 9/11 piece upstairs is a fifth — and the reference points to the way that humans use buildings to memorialize themselves. De Staebler wants to allude to classical buildings — columns and friezes especially — and he does so by finding something architectural in his human forms, most often the columnar shape of the human leg.

De Staebler hopes to make a statement in his work about the resilience of humanity, but that conclusion — that humankind will endure through these acts of creativity and memorialization — is not so easy to draw from the sculptures.

Several of the pieces — “Leg with Split Knee,” “Leg with Fractured Shin,” “Leg with Broken Foot” — point out the fragility of both humanity and clay. Rather than reassuring us that we’re achieving permanence, the works confront us with clay feels, all at once, freshly drawn from the earth and perilously close to crumbling back into it.