Two artists, two mediums, one long conversation.

Commonwheel Artists Gallery’s new exhibit, “Relics of Abstraction,” will feature raku pottery by Jerry Rhodes and woodcuts by Amy Guadagnoli. It runs through April 29.

While the two Colorado Springs artists didn’t meet before being paired together for the show, they saw each other’s work and knew it was a good match.

“Our work will talk to each other,” Guadagnoli said.

What’s unusual about Guadagnoli’s abstract, highly textured, colored woodblock prints is that she does it all by hand — pieces are hand-carved and hand-printed with a wooden spoon. She doesn’t use a printing press or machinery to make images, even though it would save her time and energy.

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People often express their surprise she doesn’t use a laser cutter to cut the wood blocks or sand blasters, but, “That’s cheating,” she said with a laugh. It’s also because relief printing is descended from rubbings.

She likes to tell an anecdote about visiting William Shakespeare’s grave in England.

“You could buy postcards of his grave and people were taking film photos of themselves at his grave,” Guadagnoli said. “But one man was sitting with a piece of parchment and making a wax rubbing of the grave. It stuck with me. It’s part of why I do woodcuts and why I do it the way I do it. The postcard and photo say I was here, I saw this. The rubbing is the only one that says I not just saw it, but I touched it.”

The tactility and physicality of woodcut is essential to her. Carving by hand with a small palm gouge gives the prints a sense of vitality, as sometimes she slips and accidentally carves an imperfection into the wood. Mistakes also can happen during the printing process, but they can lead to something unexpectedly beautiful.

“Those little imperfections multiplied by all these layers over time build up,” she said. “They give the pieces a life I don’t think they’d have if I did them with a sand blaster or computer or on a press. They’d lose a lot.”

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Rhodes, who’s lived and worked in the Pikes Peak region for decades, makes work inspired by his travels around the globe, including hiking the Inca Trail in Peru, experiencing an earthquake and avalanche on Mount Everest, and summitting Mount Kilimanjaro, as well as his involvement with the Colorado Archaeological Society.

Raku, his technique of choice, is a traditional Japanese style of pottery dating back to the 16th century. Pieces were fired in a kiln continuously for seven to eight days.

“Americans thought that’s cool, but way too long,” Rhodes said. “We took the seven-day process and crammed it into 90 minutes.”

He puts his piece in a raku kiln, fires it up to 1,800 degrees in an hour or less, and while it’s still red-hot, pulls it out and places it in a reduction chamber, essentially a garbage can with newspaper.

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“You get all kinds of nice metallic effects on some pieces,” he said. “Other pieces, where the clay shrinks and expands at different rates, you’ll get beautiful crackle patterns.”

Five of his 50ish pieces in the show are inspired by his trip to Tanzania, where he met Indigenous people, including Maasai tribesmen and women. Other pieces show Greco Roman influences from his time spent in Turkey visiting archaeological sites.

“I have a piece in the show with a lid representative of a Native American spear point,” Rhodes said. “I take images when I go out on archaeological hikes — you can see Native American pictographs and petroglyphs. I incorporate some of those into the body of my work.”

Contact the writer: 636-0270