Legs bend and splay. Toes point and flex. In and amongst the cascade of body parts, vines twist and flowers unfurl. Rachel Kneebone’s sensual and surreal sculpture 399 Days (2012-13) – named after the length of time it took her to make – stands tall at more than five metres high and comprises 63 intricately modelled exterior porcelain panels. The cylindrical sculpture, reminiscent of Trajan’s Column in both its monumentality and attention to detail, is on show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until next spring. There, in the 18th-century chapel, visitors are invited to witness the pearly forms mingle and merge.

Kneebone’s complex sculptures explore the human condition. Toggling between real and imagined, they question what it means to inhabit a body, to grow and to live. Working with bone-white porcelain, a medium more commonly associated with cups and saucers, the artist challenges preconceived notions of domesticity. She embraces the fragility and unpredictable nature of life, finding beauty in the distortions and cracks that can emerge when the malleable material is fired in the kiln and turns hard. Rather than ruined, she regards split and buckled limbs as reconfigured. The glaze adds to the impression of fluidity, the surface glossy. Kneebone’s creations are in flux; her figures undergoing a transformation.

The British artist, who was born in 1973 and lives and works in London, looks to a variety of historical art and literary sources. Her tangled mass of human and floral forms recalls the sculptural fragments of Auguste Rodin and Michelangelo, as well as the erotic figures of Jake & Dinos Chapman. There are glimpses of Angela Carter and Dante. While distinctly modern, her sculptures also nod to classical friezes, Baroque fountains, Rococo canvases. There’s something decadent about the profusion of porcelain, and yet also something austere and cold. A sense of chaos and a feeling of calm. Pleasure and peril. A beginning and an ending.

Kneebone’s 399 Days was installed in the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum from 2017 to 2019. In the wood-panelled chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, it will be displayed alongside delicate pencil drawings and more recent sculptures, among them the tomb-like Roll (2017). Throughout, tendrils, folds and ribbons entwine and fuse in an ongoing process of metamorphosis and renewal.

Rachel Kneebone: 399 Days is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park from 10 July 2021 until 24 April 2022