Installation view of Hannah Vaughn’s Reliquaries at Finch Lane Gallery with “Vessel for an ephemeral stream” (left).

Reliquaries, a show by Hannah Vaughn, billowed on the air’s breath as viewers passed through the western-facing gallery at Finch Lane. The sunlight pouring in at golden hour during the Gallery Stroll opening cast shadows on the structures hanging by threads. Her pieces breathe, like I imagine Georgia O’Keefe experienced New Mexico, with a quiet stillness that rings loud in their omnipresence in the space.

Both a teacher and practitioner of architecture, Vaughn blends the precision of construction with the artistry of experimentation. Playing with structures of traditional craft items, like kayaks and fish baskets and kites, Vaughn weaves nostalgia and history into her intricately built structures.

Her childhood in the sticks with her siblings included putting sheets of metal to their backs and jumping into pits to catch air to pass the days. She weaves these memories into the architectural kite on display. It is clear she has made many a prototype, showing a precision that allows for a freedom to play in her builds.

“Momma” is a hanging basket of sorts, resembling a traditional fish basket used by Native Americans as a method of passive fishing. It had an internal structure that you would not want to fall on; wooden daggers support the steam bent wood that her boat-building friend helped her construct. The frame is wrapped in ripped pieces of Mulberry paper that have been lathered in beeswax, inspired by her bee-keeping brother—another nod to family while adding structural integrity. The Mulberry paper does not quite wrap around the entire structure, leaving a fissure, a crevasse that, with a title like “Momma,” elicits a sense of birth, of a protected sanctuary of the womb, organic and wrapped, but ready to turn violent to protect her kin. The piece is like a basket that carried the baby down the river. Or caught the fish for dinner.

Installation view of Reliquaries at Finch Lane Gallery, with, from left, “Momma” (2026), “Encasement Study #2” (2026), and “Imprint Study” (2026).

“The Clarified Body No. 1” (left) and “The Clarified Body No. 2”

Her “Clarified Body,” No. 1 and 2, include bones of a large bovine set in bricks of linen and cotton pulp almost like in metal cast. Vaughn collected the bones across her jaunts in nature—conjuring for the viewer an image of coming across the unlucky creature that got stuck in a ravine, its bones laid to rest along the creek. Vaughn has cut the bone into a cross section, showing the capillary action inside, integrating an architectural tone to natural materials. In this piece and others across the show, the artist uses natural fibers that blend the natural materials of a landscape with the humans that have used the land and its resources for their survival long before settlers arrived.

Hannah Vaughn, “Reliquary No. 1,” 2025

Other hanging pieces are porcelain, seemingly thrown on a clay wheel, with indents and wonk that would perhaps disqualify them from a potter’s collection. Vaughn took those pieces and in an experiment with pine resin, dunked corners of the former into the latter, coating them in the amber glaze that dripped like honey from the wand. They feel frozen in time, the carafes about to pour guests their libation for the evening, bent slightly forward, the spout ready to pour the imaginary liquid into a stoneware mug.

In “Imprint Study,” sheets of porcelain hang in a cascade of rhythmic staccato. Like sheets of paper flying on the wind or music notes dancing across a page, there is a musicality to this piece, even in its silence. The mini loose leafs are pressed into a body, leaving relief contours of ambiguous sinuousity. Ripples like cloth turn this hard material soft and gentle, caressing and warm. The shadows produced from the western facing windows create a fluttering effect, the staccato, a dance of light and darkness—shape and form beyond the physical piece of work Vaughn produced, leaving the spontaneity of the moment a freedom to express itself.

Even Vaughn’s ink studies on Mylar sheet bring a sense of airiness and movement through her two dimensional work. Layers like those seen in Utah’s canyon country—the land’s history written in cross section—stack textures and patterns atop one another in a terrain of compaction and erosion. Feathers create a layer of levity among the denser, more topographical marks, tracing contours of motion like a black-and-white film still.

There is no “slightly off” in architecture. Not without risking the integrity of structures, the foundation that can be brought to rubble by a single miscalculation. Hannah Vaughn demonstrates that precision of craft, then carries it into materials and structures with perhaps less at stake, where play and personal history are free to surface. Her pieces are as sound as any prototype, adding a sense of quiet nostalgia to the industrious tact of the show. You can hear the croaks along the riverbank beside the canoe, the whoosh of air lifting the kite. The feathers settle. The bones rest in remembrance of lives lived.

Installation detail of Hannah Vaughn ““Imprint Study.”

Hannah Vaughn: Reliquaries, Finch Lane Gallery, Salt Lake City, through May 29.

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.