Artist Orly Genger, 25, was studying sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, encasing found objects like flashlights and soccer balls in plaster, when she took a bus ride that changed her art.

“I was sitting next to a woman crocheting,” she said. The movement of the woman’s fingers and the crochet hook immediately fascinated her: “I realized it looked like the hook was extraneous.”

Ms. Genger quickly figured out a way to crochet using only her fingers. “At the time, I was doing it just to keep my hands busy,” she said. “I was doing it all the time…I ended up with this large piece of something. It had a muscularity to it. I realized I had made sculpture.”

The technique became the basis for a wave of sculptural works that will be displayed in September at a solo show at Elizabeth Dee Gallery and in a large outdoor installation at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens.

Ms. Genger’s works vary in size from computer-screen-size wall hangings to a 25-foot-long piece that will be displayed as a large spiral in the upcoming gallery show. She uses nontraditional materials such as elastic and thick climbing rope. Most of the colors she uses “are subdued, because I want to draw attention to the form.”

Even if they were splashed in neon colors, none of Ms. Genger’s works could be mistaken for summer camp pot-holder projects.

The technique, which Ms. Genger said is “basically a way of knotting,” is mesmerizingly speedy. Her fingers move with a dexterity familiar to anyone with a crocheter in the family – it can take a moment for an observer to realize that the expected crochet hook is nowhere to be found, and that the products are rarely the neat squares of a grandmother’s afghan. Ms. Genger shrugs off the suggestion that the technique, or her speed at employing it, is impressive on its own. “It’s a very forgiving process. You can just make it up as you go along.”

Ms. Genger grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to a family that was more fine art than arts-and-crafts. (Her father, Arie, is a prominent Israeli-American businessman.) After graduating from Brown University in 2002, she did a graduate year in sculpture in Chicago studying under well known fiber artist Anne Wilson, who often uses human hair in her work.

By the time Ms. Genger moved back to Manhattan, she was concentrating on her crocheted sculptures. She settled into a spacious studio in the arty Starrett-Lehigh Building, a former factory that now churns out art at an impressively industrial rate. Galleries on site include The Annex, Radio House Gallery, Pamela Auchincloss, and Edlin Fine Art.

Ms. Genger’s corner studio has two walls of windows, but “no A.C.,” she sighed as she creaked open a panel. The other two walls hold her newest work, a few of which burble down onto the floor.

Though the room is bright and homey (with a great view of the city), she said that “most of the ‘making’ I don’t do at the studio. Because of the material, I can do it anywhere. It’s more of a way of life. “Yet in the next breath, she added that “I’m basically in the studio five or six days a week.” Because of her unusual textile needs, “even just getting the material can take two days.”

In a corner, dozens of large plastic storage bins are filled with her older works. She will return to some of those when the mood strikes. “When you look at a piece later on,” she said, “it’s like handwriting” – each loop and knot has the ability to call up memories of its creation. She described the works as having “fistprints” embedded in them and said that “it’s like a record, a very organic type of record.”

But it’s not just memories that can be extracted from Ms. Genger’s pieces. There are threads of the feminist art movement woven throughout. “There’s a long line of female artists who reference the body,” she explained. “You don’t see it as much in male work…. A possible explanation is the [public] focus on the female body, because you can feel defined by it. It becomes an object and a sculpture, things you can inspect.” Thus the “fistprints” take on new meaning, as the imprints made by a female body on an object of her own creation.

So does she consider herself a feminist artist? The answer is complicated. “Young female artists sometimes have a problem with being called ‘feminist,’ because it simplifies them,” she said slowly. “But I think being connected to feminist art is a privilege. It doesn’t have to be limiting…I’ve read a lot about female artists, and often they fought, as if [the term] was putting them down. I’ve felt that way, too, but I would embrace it now, and try to create new branches.”

She admires the German minimalist artist Eva Hesse, who constantly experimented with mixing her media. Ms. Genger’s piece “Very Important Thing” alludes to Hesse’s 1966 “Untitled or Not Yet” – Ms. Genger imitates Hesse’s fish-net-and-metal cluster of teardrops in crocheted matte elastic.

Like most artists who work with fiber and textiles, Ms. Genger contends not just with the “feminism” label but with the comparison of her sculptures to “arts and crafts” fare.

“You try to fight the association to your mother knitting,” she said with a laugh, “But it is inherent.”