As I listened to her, my initial hypothesis found a more precise point of contact. I had begun to think about the vessel, understood broadly as a form that receives, holds or surrounds. The conversation carried that operation toward the desire to belong. Making room for something and finding a place to be can be thought of together. From there I would like to look at the exhibition, conscious that this is my own reading and that its reach will depend on what the works allow it to sustain.

To develop it, I also draw on prior research into their trajectories and on the works I have been able to access, which allow their practices to be considered beyond this exhibition.

Tracy McClorey’s ceramic caves offer a concrete expression of that possibility. Her Keep Caves series is conceived to house memories and meaningful objects. They are small spaces that each person can inhabit with whatever they wish to preserve. The interior accommodates a history of its own. The form receives a content whose importance derives from the relationship someone has with it.

In Judith Effa Ford’s work, the altar and assemblage allow another approach. Reclaimed objects, fragments of jewelry and fabrics find an arrangement through which they acquire meaning anew. In Tracy Casagrande Clancy’s work, layers of wax fuse through heat and safeguard the materials incorporated within them. Her references to shelter and the human figure give that material operation a resonance that deserves examination. These are examples through which the idea of the vessel begins to take substance, and through which it can continue to be considered.

Extending it to all the artists requires restraint. A form that protects a memory, a surface that incorporates emotionally charged fragments and a space that receives the public allow for many relationships, but those relationships will contain differences. The hypothesis remains useful as long as it allows something to be discovered in the works. Its development requires attention to the singularity of each and a choice of the moments in which that relationship becomes perceptible.

The biographies offer another way into the same problem. Several of these artists have worked in education, mental health, bereavement support or human services. Those experiences help us understand the importance they attach to the effect of their work on other people. Receiving, listening, accompanying. They also allow us to ask what remains of those professions when attention shifts toward a form, a material or an image. In each trajectory, the answer will have its own measure.

Loss runs through several of those experiences and reappears in some of their works. Its relationship with care has a particular force, because it compels us to consider how to attend to what a person can barely manage to hold. The vessel can then acquire a symbolic meaning. A form capable of holding memory, of offering pain a place or of making shareable an experience that seemed confined within the person living it. That possibility comes close to what Rhodes describes when she speaks of suffering as a bond.

Cincinnati can also be understood through that capacity to welcome. Studios, artists’ associations, cultural centers and galleries provide places where a practice finds continuity and a relationship with others. The city enters the exhibition through those conditions of existence and, as Rhodes’s triptych shows, through experiences that elicit an artistic response. Its presence changes scale, from the space that houses a community to the life of a person who needs to be seen.

The unity the exhibition proposes therefore allows a reading through belonging and another through the forms that make it possible. Mary emphasized the desire to broaden the concept and open it to the visitor’s experience. My own path pauses, for the moment, at the capacity to receive, preserve and sustain that I find in some of these works. Both perspectives can accompany one another while leaving room for the one each observer is able to shape.

Before each personal poetics, before particular pieces, I would like to ask myself what they wish to grant protection and shelter to. Also what position is occupied by the person who interacts with them and what kind of relationship is offered. Moving through the exhibition with those questions allows unity to be thought of as a practice that unfolds in ways that are not necessarily unified. But the sky they share, in the title, is immeasurable and can be the place from which those differences recognize one another and find room.