Spanning a large lobby on the second floor of a steel and glass office tower on Bishop Street, there's an art gallery, appropriately if unimaginatively named The Exhibit Space at 1132 Bishop Street.

This sprawling foyer provides an opportunity for artists to demonstrate where art goes to be ignored. On a recent late Saturday morning, three security guards sat at the top of a long escalator and asked me what I was doing as I wandered around.

"Um, I'm here to look at the art," I replied.

I turned the corner and walked into "House of Fire, Four Directions From The Fire Island," a display of ceramics and sculpture by Randy Takaki, Clayton Amemeia, Fumi Bonk and Setsuko Morinoue.

I shouldn't complain about the way art is placed in settings that may not have been designed for art, because if we only put sculpture in museums, there'd be a lot less to look at as we walked through our lives.

Still I resist the notion that the only purpose for art is to exist as decoration. The Exhibit Space, as far as I can tell, makes no effort to give any context for viewing the work on display.

Or maybe I just think the work on display deserves a better showcase. When I look at ceramics, I know little about the technique required to fire clay or throw a pot. I demand of the ceramic sculpture only what I demand of any kind of art: I'm looking for something to trigger a reaction. I seek beauty. I'm hoping to be engaged in symbolic conversation.

Because I find The Exhibit Space somewhat dreary, I entered "House of Fire" with a chip on my shoulder. Fortunately, the featured artists were able to knock that chip off.

If there was any information available at the gallery to explain connections between the artists, I missed it, but it helps to know that each sculptor lives and works on the Big Island in one of the four geographical directions. Embedded in the process of the art's creation is fire and earth. Unlike some forms of sculpture and painting, ceramics depends not only on the hand of the artist, but also on the whims and designs of nature.

Visitors will see art rendered by time, wind, earth and fire.

There's something deceptive about viewing a piece like Amemeia's "Red Pot with Vertical Lines." As it's displayed in this urban grotto, the twisting and conical vessel appears delicate and rugged at once. We see artful symmetry and delineated curves. What is less apparent is the way this urn was forged by wood fire.

The pot, like its title, seems straightforward and direct, though it would not be sitting gracefully inside the display case unless earth was ripped from the ground, unless trees burned, and unless fire turned clay into stone.

To look at the work in "House of Fire" is to understand that ceramics is an art of transformation, where destruction and creation are part of the same process.

In "Architectural Vase 1," Morinoue fabricates a small tower that turns in on itself. It falls and stands at the same time. There is texture in the clay as it bends toward some twisty geometry. Supple and stiff, Morinoue's structure made me think about some of life's basic paradoxes: To create, we destroy; to stand alone, we must lean against.

If Morinoue and Amemeia alerted me to some of the ways that clay communicates abstraction in concrete form, then Fumi Bonk provided me with some of the "Wow!" moments that I shamelessly seek from a gallery experience.

I don't know how Bonk creates her relatively gigantic towers of lush stoneware, but I know that they grab my attention.

As one can discern from titles such as "Elements of Nature: Wind," "Light and Life," and "No Beginning, No End," Bonk addresses large themes, and her most compelling work transcends questions of technique, questions of "how did she do that?" In their allusions to temple structures and earth forms, Bonk's sculptures ask me to think about the essence of the supernatural.

This link between nature and spirit is reinforced in the wood and wire sculpture of Randy Takaki. Thin posts of Big Island wood are shaped and scratched until they insinuate human form. Stationed throughout the gallery space, Takaki's works evoke religious iconography. Like totems, each piece suggests connection to the distinctly human desire to make contact with the ephemeral.

As I walked out of the building and back to my car, I passed a tree on Beretania that I've never really noticed. The color of the tree reminded me of the color of clay. I saw texture, and for a moment, the bark seemed grafted on by human hands.

When I realized that I was staring at the tree, I understood that in spite of my indifference (at best) for The Exhibit Space, my ability to see had been recalibrated and enhanced by my visit to the "House of Fire."

Timothy Dyke is a teacher at Punahou School.