Stumbling upon the Sarcophagi in Glass Houses at Storm King feels like landing in a fairy tale gone absurdly wrong.

The greenhouse cages sit like Snow White’s glass coffin with mysterious shapes inside. Instead of a comatose maiden (pleasant by comparison), you discover yourself face to face with the belly of the beast…literally. Abakanowicz claimed the beastly forms were like the stomachs of sleeping men. Four amorphous, oak forms lie like mummified corpses on display.

The backstory is that Abakanowicz was sampling some Roquefort, salivating over a wine-soaked baguette on a visit to Burgundy’s industrial district of Le Creusot when she discovered a set of engine-housing casting models in storage from the nineteenth century. Immediately, she made the tummy connection- slumbering turbines are the powerhouse stomachs of the machine world! The macabre displays have been frozen in their sepulchral homes ever since.