For The Love Of
Becca Ito
In the Speck Gallery, experience For The Love Of by Becca Ito with Leah McMichael, Katheryn Pourcho, and Katie Ito. Celebrate Indiana’s precarious beauty: field and forest, friendship and flight. Ceramics, surface design, storytelling, and regenerative agriculture come together to image the places we love and the world we want to see.
Because I love Indiana, this year’s erratic weather and smoke-thick air and growing crowd of endangered species fill me with fear. But this precarious dazzling world keeps summoning love out through the smog. Redwing blackbirds serenade beneath a wildfire sky. Drifts of blackberries bloom along Lake Michigan’s shore, foam dancing on the gray-green waters. A feast of summer light falls golden through the leaves. It calls us back, until Becca is shaping clay into mug and mirror and urn and Katheryn is sketching the creatures we stand to lose. Katie paints gold luster murmurations and watercolors reciprocity. And I (Leah) get to write about all of it, how this making is a way to hold lament and hope together in the land we love.
Feast of Damocles Series Mugs
In the gallery, Brie-bakers sidle up to garlic roasters because no one tends the world alone. Flourishing is mutual—so say the mirrors of goldenrod and aster, brighter together, or the morel and wild cherry that feed each other underground. The Feast of Damocles sets mugs and bowls swaying, abundance hanging by a thread. Katheryn’s Hooded Warblers and American Badgers peer off the swirled-clay bodies of mugs with eyes questioning what we’ll do when so much can be lost or saved.
Meanwhile, our friends at Falcon Creek Farm are getting ready to plant trees. Native Elderberry, Aronia, Hazelnut and Serviceberry trees will build and stabilize soil, welcome more creatures of wing and earth, draw CO2 from the air, and extend the farm’s bounty. Five percent of each gallery purchase will go toward this sapling fund: the show growing up to be an orchard long after these pieces are scattered to their separate homes.
For the Love Of in the Speck Gallery August 2023
There are a thousand, thousand ways to stand up for all we love.
See For The Love Of in the Speck Gallery throughout the month of August and in the online gallery through the end of September.