As human expressions are revealed they are imprinted and given structure by the socially imbued forms that voice them. The personal, natural, and the social all dance together in fantastic splendor in Benglis' work. The chimera of Benglis' work functions like the fantastic in dreams which conflates mundane existence with the imaginative, but in a socialized and personalized way, like nature within society. The mercurial mask covers up while it also reflects, therefore changing what it comes into contact with as does the heavy metal mercury, named after the Greek and Roman gods of interpretation and play Hermes and Mercury. The mercurial in Benglis' work exists like a double helix, or the intertwined snakes of the caduceus, the scepter of Mercury.
Snakes intertwine like the brute force of nature mixing with human artificiality.
In Benglis' work, the act of artistic creation is embedded in presentation of process, the movement of materials. While this can be seen as a more formalistic pursuit, within Benglis' work it becomes an act of transformation, a sort of alchemical presentation in which material presence, with a life of its own, crashes with artistic manipulation. Process becomes the act of mixing and combining diverse elements that maintain a voice of their own while taking on various shapes with multiple meanings. Works like Scarab , which comes from an earlier series of silver and gold bowed works, is congruously luminous and beautiful in an undulating way that signifies not only bows but also jewelry and personal adornment. While these objects have the luminosity and cosmic pull of the sun and moon, they also act as objects of cultural manifestation of what is feminine.