Charissa Brock's sculptures are chameleons, sometimes resembling tall, slightly misshapen houses made of small sticks, or Anasazi dwellings rising from the earth. Shaped like seed pods, boats and lotus flowers, her pieces are constructed of fastidiously stacked chunks of bamboo and glass, bound together with waxed linen thread and displayed on steel stands.

The fastest growing plant on earth, bamboo is also one of the most versatile, used by Japanese artists for centuries to create vessels of amazing elegance and variety. When bamboo was initially suggested to her as an art-making material, Brock was doubtful, but her first direct experience with the towering stalks sparked an immediate kinship and a flood of ideas about its possibilities.

At one time or another, weaving, clay and fiber have all intrigued the artist, going back to her days as a student at Albuquerque's Manzano High School. Later, at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, she flipped back and forth between fiber and glass while also taking classes in figure sculpture and welding. She finally settled on fiber at the Tyler School of Art, where she earned a graduate degree in fine arts.

Elements of all these genres show up in her work, which has received wide recognition by museums and galleries across the country. The eight sculptures featured in her latest show at Thirteen Moons were born out of Brock's desire to create pieces with more fluid, three-dimensional designs and from the continued inspiration of nature and the artifacts of ancient cultures.

"Shared Earth" is a two-mouthed vessel composed of split, U-shaped sections of bamboo, sewn together and decorated with glass leaves. The basis of "Dance of Light" is an S-curve and five concentric circles of glass flowers which allow light to pass through the piece. "Moon During Day" was inspired by a childhood memory of unearthing a cicada pod from the ground and looking up to a daylight sky dominated by clouds passing over a full moon.

Fortunately Brock is patient, since the journey from pole to finished piece is surprisingly long. She cuts her own bamboo, allows it to dry for six months to two years, then uses a propane burner to extract starch from the plant. Only then can she begin to cut the culms, or main stems, into tiny brick-shaped bits. Workdays in her Portland, Ore., studio are typically nine or 10 hours long.

"Depending on where it comes from, the bamboo can be totally different colors," Brock notes. "In this exhibition, it has a speckled quality. It's black and a little green and a little beige. It also has a somewhat shiny or lacquered surface that is its natural glow."

"It takes a mastery to do this well," she adds. "I'm still learning, and that's one of the things I like best. With bamboo, there is always going to be mystery involved."