“Flesh mixed with gowns, like kneaded satin; that is the substance of flowers.” The line comes from The Voice of Things (1942), a book of prose poems by Francis Ponge in which he muses on the beauty of the commonplace—the erratic flight of butterflies, the pleasure of opening and closing doors—eager to see past an object’s functional existence into a life beyond.

The artist Rosemary Mayer was drawn to the idea of setting one’s sights on this rich existence of the ordinary material world. She once used Ponge’s line to characterize her sculpture Proserpina (1975), named for the Roman goddess of springtime whose return from the underworld at the end of each winter revived the earth’s flora.…