Judith Scott s sculptures look like oversized cocoons or nests. They begin with regular objects a chair, a wire hanger, an umbrella, or even a shopping cart which are swallowed up whole by thread, yarn, cloth and twine, swathed as frenetically as a spider mummifies its prey.

The resulting pieces are tightly wound bundles of texture, color and shape abstract and yet so intensely corporeal in their presence and power. They suggest an alternate way of seeing the world, not based on knowing but on touching, taking, loving, nurturing and eating whole. Like a wildly wrapped package, the sculptures seem to possess some secret or meaning that cant be accessed, save for an energy that radiates outward; the mysterious comfort of knowing that something is truly unknowable.

Judith and Joyce Scott were born on May 1, 1943, in Columbus, Ohio. They were fraternal twins. Judith, however, carried the extra chromosome of Down Syndrome and couldnt communicate verbally. Only later, when Judith was in her 30s, was she properly diagnosed as deaf. There are no words, but we need none, Joyce wrote in her memoir Entwined , which tells the confounding story of her and Judiths life together. What we love is the comfort of sitting with our bodies near enough to touch.

As a kid, Joyce and Judith were wrapped up in their own secret world, full of backyard adventures and made-up rituals whose rules were never said out loud. In an interview with The Huffington Post, Joyce explained that during her youth, she wasnt aware that Judith had a mental disability, or even that she was, in some way, different.

She was just Judy to me, Joyce said. I didnt think of her as different at all. As we got older, I started realizing that people in the neighborhood treated her differently. That was my first thought, that people treated her badly.