The Shapes of Curiosity
Brenna Bruggerman
→BFA CER 2026
I dreamed that I floated at will in the great ether, and I saw this world floating not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, “This must thou eat,” and I ate the world.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
When was a time you felt inescapably close? Mine always happened at sunsets. A compulsion to hold onto the California sun for longer brought me to my backyard, where I would watch the light become more intensely golden just before tucking under the horizon of our roof, slipping through my fingers. As dusk settled in, the pool heater’s humming got louder, and the grass released a sweetness into the air. Then a cool breeze would roll in, leaving me with prickly skin and an ominous feeling of impending darkness and bedtime. This anxiety would be met with the comfort of remembering that it would rise again tomorrow. I was engulfed by the inevitability of both darkness and light, aware that the world was turning and that I couldn’t stop it.
Since then, I’ve somehow drifted away from this closeness. What do I blame for this drift? Perhaps we’re too saturated with light. With the power to ward off the night in the palm of our hands, time turns into an ever-refreshing now. But without this darkness, how can
we dream?
No matter the cause or conditions of this distance, art is my greatest attempt to navigate it. Whether through paintbrushes, poems, theories, or numerous devices pointed towards a sunset, the compulsion in everyone is the same: to immortalize this pervading, fleeting beauty. Emerson’s dream expresses his desire not just to hold onto the beauty of the world, but to consume it. Beauty, then, becomes substance for our flesh and the gut the ultimate vessel for closeness and understanding. The world was an obligation handed to him in the form of a gift. “This must thou eat,” said the angel, as if this is what we are here for: to get closer to our closeness.
As children, our lower eye level naturally brought us closer to the questions that were patiently waiting all around us: Where might this ant trail lead? What’s under this rock? We intuitively knew that a question as large as “why” was contained within moments as small as these. I remember when my curiosity led me to the question of life itself. Once, I followed an ant trail from our backyard to the alley around the side of our house, where I found the palm-sized helpless creature, a dying bird, breathing rapidly and being explored by ants. “Surely we could save it?” My dad humored this plan and helped me transfer it to a padded box. I tried feeding it honey water with a dropper for a couple hours before it suddenly flapped its wings for the last time in a bout of panic. We buried her in our garden. My first encounter with death was answered with a variation of “that’s nature honey”…“the cycle of life.” Looking up at the tree from which the bird fell, looking for the mother who let this happen, I thought: what’s nature then, and why must it cycle? What’s life and why must it end? I recognize now that getting closer to the answers is about getting closer to the questions.
I lower my eye level once again, through the tunnel of the microscope. I’m staring at a blob, a word that doesn’t do justice to the elegance of the shape undulating and transforming beneath my eyes, resisting stasis but simultaneously searching for it, not unlike the question of why itself. From the blob, branch-like tendrils are extended, or the blob extends arm-like tendrils, towards a particle floating near it. With a flexible outer boundary and a liquid interior, the outer membrane begins to bend toward the food particle, guided by the invisible pull of the chemical gradient. Its inner fluid flows into the new space that the outer boundary carved out for it. The rushing of the fluid accelerates the extension of this shape, gesturing like an arm reaching towards a fruit. When it reaches the particle, it warps around it, creating a bubble where it’s then digested by enzymes in the fluid. As I unsquint my eye and uncrane my neck, what I’ve seen through this microscopic portal settles into my reality: that this single-celled organism with no brain, called Chaos Chaos, appears to be walking and reaching towards food. Is this the shape of curiosity? Not a static shape, but an inevitable movement towards knowing, becoming closer, and digesting.
This motion courses through all of nature’s iterations and experiments: gentle questions of “what ifs” asked through the mutations that provoked evolution. One day, a cell was dividing, as it normally would, but this time, two daughter cells accidentally stuck together instead of separating, only to find that they could survive longer when they aggregated together. They set off, as did other cells that might’ve discovered the same thing, eventually clumping together to form even bigger units. Then, this spherical clump of cells floating in the life-giving liquid of water, whose suspension and insistence of movement made this experiment possible, collapses inward and forms a hollow vessel. This hollow vessel now inhabits and creates a reality with a defined outside versus inside, where food can be trapped and digested. The 19th-century artist and biologist Ernst Haeckel, who explored Darwinian thought, named this primordial gut Gastraea. Although this fictional primal gut exists within the ether of imagination and has since been disproved as a simplification of a more complex process, I find the theory beautiful, that this cup shape floating around in the ocean might have been a primal gut; an ultimate vessel for closeness from which we evolved.
If every form was created by a need, like nature’s curiosity being a catalyst for evolution, then what is the function of curiosity within us? My first memorable vessel was my neon-coral crossbody purse, made from soft pleather with silver accents and an inside lining just as bright coral as the outside. The space inside my mom’s purse had always exuded depth and mystery, yet it somehow always had exactly what I needed. But this personal space of my first purse was empty yet filled with possibility and independence, free to carry exactly what I needed. I was excited to fill it and hold it close.
In her essay “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula Le Guin retraces our steps in time and space to another primal vessel shape with the claim that the earliest cultural invention must have been a container, or a vessel, to hold gathered food. While it might have made for a more action-packed plot to imagine that tools or weapons were among the first human inventions, she proposes that “with or before the tool that forces energy outwards, we made the tool that brings energy home” (Le Guin 28). To witness the invention of the first cultural device, we can simply watch as a toddler tries to carry too much in her arms, moving with persistence and determination, no matter how much she keeps dropping. There you’ll find the first realization of necessity for a bag, and of the simple, useful beauty of one. Or in the moment of deviating from a path, to pick up a leaf or a shell, turning it around in our palm, wondering how it might be of use to us. Vessels of meaning that are formed from these moments of deviating, stumbling, and fumbling, in turn, shape what we come to hold as meaning.
As it got colder here in Providence and the trees began to shed their leaves, I became entranced by the bare trunks and branches that revealed themselves. Their dynamic limbs began to reach into my periphery on my daily walk to classes, entrancing enough to make me stop and admire the graceful way they overlapped and entangled. I wanted to capture them somehow, but often felt too rushed to get to class. One day, I decided to release the urgency of where I needed to be for a moment and follow the impulse. I sat down with my tiny watercolor palette and 4 x 6-inch paper and began to capture the lines of the branches that seemed more decisive and intentional the more I looked. Colors that I never noticed when the tree had leaves revealed themselves in the bark. Over the hump of hesitation, these tree paintings became habitual. Gently noticing turned into a more active mode of attending. I developed a new habit of seeing that let the world reach back out towards me, now noticing my attention being drawn to trees everywhere as more of their beauty was revealed to me. A new path, charted by a curious detour to the periphery, that, with the momentum of habit coursing through it, grew into a hearty branch. Curiosity, the shape of life finding its way.
Can you see it? Curiosity’s shape in the tangling branches, the meandering paths of collecting, the reaching arms of Chaos Chaos, the veins that course through the palms of our hands? Journeying backwards into histories, through the substance of imagination and scientific portals. Outwards into observation, but also inwards and down, returning to the depths of the ocean from where we came. Can we, while submerged in the inevitable gradient from darkness to light, sink closer to the questions that remain unanswered?
Brenna Bruggeman just deleted Instagram for the umpteenth time.
All artworks by the author.
Fig. 1 This thou must eat, 2026, red-oxide ink prints on stoneware
Fig. 2 Untitled, 2024, cast glass
Fig. 3 Flipped, observed, 2026, stoneware and polymer clay
Fig. 4 Ameba Feeding (400X Magnification), YouTube, https://youtu.be/mv6Ehv06mXY.
Fig. 5 Schematic presentation of the gastrocanal system in different leucon-type sponges, Illustrated by Haeckel. From Levit, G. S., Hoßfeld, U., Naumann, B., Lukas, P., & Olsson, L. (2022). The biogenetic law and the Gastraea theory: From Ernst Haeckel’s discoveries to contemporary views. https://doi.org/10.1002/jez.b.23039
Fig. 6 Pareidolia, 2024, wax casts, sheet glass
Fig. 7 Tree Paintings 2024-2025, watercolor