Beautiful Turned-Wood Bowls for a Cause, Courtesy of the Maine State Prison

By Monique Brouillette
Photographed by Tara Rice
From our September 2022 difficulty

Earlier this yr, Joe Ryan, govt director of Knox County’s Space Interfaith Outreach, was working with Camden’s Web page Gallery on an thought for a fundraiser: artist-designed soup-can labels, to be auctioned off in help of the group’s meals pantry. However soup cans symbolize an previous notion of meals pantries, Ryan realized. And AIO, a 32-year-old group specializing in meals and vitality help, shouldn’t be a spot for affordable canned items however reasonably contemporary, native produce and different nutritious meals. The meals pantry, which moved into a brand new constructing in Rockland two years in the past, seems like a quaint neighborhood grocery. Outdoors, it’s flanked by vegetable gardens. Inside, the light-filled area is stuffed with tidy cabinets stocked with vegetables and fruit, freshly baked bread, and regionally roasted espresso beans. Since shifting into its new facility, AIO has gone from serving 50 midcoast households to greater than 200 every week.

Another fundraiser thought struck Ryan just a few months in the past. Wood bowls, symbolizing contemporary and wholesome meals, would a lot better symbolize what AIO does, he thought. And he knew simply the place to supply them — the Maine State Jail. Gardening is a part of the Maine Division of Corrections’ programming, and the Maine State Jail, in Warren, delivers truckloads of extra produce, grown by residents, to AIO. Ryan remembered studying, in a gathering earlier this yr with corrections commissioner Randall Liberty, that residents of the Maine State Jail additionally turned wood bowls within the facility’s woodshop, and Liberty had provided to assist with a fundraiser in any method that he may. And so, AIO’s ArtFeeds undertaking, in collaboration with the Web page Gallery and the Maine Division of Corrections, will likely be auctioning off 35 wood bowls made on the jail and adorned by native artists.

The one route for the artists was to “create one thing that represents the neighborhood caring for each other with meals.” Twenty-eight artists, together with Web page Gallery founder Colin Web page, two teenage food-pantry volunteers, and a Maine State Jail resident, contributed designs utilizing every thing from paint to decoupage to cyanotype print. A couple of different artists created their very own ceramic and wood bowls. Some are meals secure and able to use on the dinner desk, others solely artwork items. “On this neighborhood, we aren’t outlined by going to artwork museums or meals pantries,” Ryan says. “All of us love artwork and meals and need to maintain each other.”

The bowls are on show on the Web page Gallery September 3–10. A reception and silent public sale will likely be held on Saturday, September 10. The exhibition and public sale are free to attend.

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