An old, turquoise-legged ironing board topped with a plank of unfinished wood stands in the middle of Finch Lane’s West Gallery. On it are five oval platters, their rims crimped like pie crusts, their centers glazed white, soft gray and pale blue. One carries a ladder-like motif drawn in faint green, another the impression of a sprig of flowers. It’s a fitting entry into Patterns of Place, a two-person exhibition in which Janimarie Lester DeRose and Aurora Hughes Villa take up the objects and patterns of the household—and consider what they can remember for us.

DeRose, a Cache Valley ceramicist who teaches at Sky View High School, treats the surfaces of her teapots and serving pieces like sketchbooks. Line drawings of leaves, blossoms and seed heads wrap around the body of one gray teapot, while blooms and handwriting run across the pie server “Sweet Icing Days.” On nearly all these functional pieces, DeRose’s glaze stops short of the foot, revealing a band of red-brown stoneware. This exposed clay takes over in DeRose’s wall pieces, like “A Loss, a memory, a story,” where eleven spoons and other utensils, ranging from the delicate to the irregular, span five feet of wall. Across the room, four unglazed terracotta forms, decorated with scattered lavender-blue leaves, resemble broken shelf brackets.

Hughes Villa, an associate professor and arts education program director at Utah State University, has worked with wallpaper imagery for more than a decade, using it to approach memory through the surfaces surrounding domestic life. She previously scanned vintage patterns, manipulated them digitally and transferred them to clay through silkscreening—a visual language that in her recent work expands to include architectural ornament and forms inspired by ironwork encountered during travels in Italy.

Her Threshold series at Finch Lane is particularly exuberant. Twelve-inch panels layer silkscreen, monoprint, wallpaper, acrylic and gouache into grids of sage green, rose, slate blue and cream. Damask florals peek through from underneath while heavy four-lobed shapes and interlocking grids sit on top. Occasionally a tiny engraved woman emerges amid the pattern, or a row of turquoise circles hangs from a sewn thread. Her ceramic installation is more subtle. About thirty small flower-shaped tiles, glazed in pale, cool hues, drift loosely across the wall. Most carry a fine drawing of a single botanical stem. They are individually charming, while together they suggest the repeating patterns of wallpaper.

Throughout Patterns of Place, repetition becomes a way of holding on to things. Hughes Villa through wallpaper, flowers, grids and ornamental screens; DeRose with spoons, platters, teapots and serving dishes. Both work at close range, at the places in a house where patterns are lived with long enough to go unnoticed but continue to vibrate, however subtly, with lived memory.

Aurora Hughes Villa & Janimarie Lester DeRose: Patterns of Place, Finch Lane Gallery, Salt Lake City, through Oct. 23.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.