Printmaker Lesley Patterson-Marx’s current exhibit at TAG showcases work from the last two years, when she has been in the thick of new life. The gallery pairs her work with that of her good friend, Emily Holt. Both make art with a playful sense of the world’s connectedness. Author Annie Dillard could be describing Patterson-Marx when she writes that “The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse.” For some time, Patterson-Marx has been making prints and handmade books that rescue thrift store photographs and magazine images, putting them into settings that uncover correspondences between psychological, social and natural processes. Images of people and plants flow together, suggesting similarities between the growth and decay of vegetation and the formation and decay of personality, as well as the continuity between human generations as one seeds the next. Though this has always been fertile soil for Patterson-Marx, one transformative event has charged her work with more intensity: motherhood. With pregnancy, childbirth, nursing and raising a son, now 19 months old, art that had always been insightful about the nature of personhood suddenly became both personal and visceral as well. Visual homologies—things linked together by common shapes—lie at the core of Patterson-Marx’s work. A drop shape can refer to tears, rain or breast milk. Breasts share their shape with garden mounds. Plants have veins in their leaves that echo the structure of their root system, both of which look like blood veins or milk ducts. One pair of prints sets out some of her basic symbolism. “The Breast as Water” shows a single breast hanging down, a line of white drops falling out of it and joining a row of drops that hang over the serrated edges of waves on water. In “The Breast as Earth,” the breast points upward and a plant sprouts from the nipple. A few drops, maybe sap, spit out of the branches, and the filaments of ducts, veins or roots trace through the nipple. These images recur throughout her work. Another key element for Patterson-Marx is the use of images of people, usually cut or copied from old photos. For example, “Inheritance” places a photo of five women into a print in which a canopy of breasts rains down drops. The women are of different ages, suggesting multiple generations, the child-bearers and story keepers of every family. The photo in “Inheritance” is probably a thrift store find, but in a small print titled “Singing to Our Grandparents,” Patterson-Marx’s own family appears. A trio of singers line the bottom of the print, singing to an upside down image taken from a photo of a choir. One of the men in the photo was her own grandfather, singing with his church choir. In this image, engaging in a common act like church singing links us to particular progenitors and constitutes an act of devotion to their spirit and memory. The artist goes furthest when she combines elements. In “The Celebration of Letting Down,” a cluster of breasts hangs down like clouds and rains multicolored drops onto a group of well-groomed children dancing in a ring, an image of effusive fecundity. The largest breast has sections cut out to create a network of veins. The cutouts reveal an underlying map of the area around Paducah, Ky., where Patterson-Marx lived for several years and maintains important friendships. Many things converge in the image. The breasts double as clouds, feeding the children and plants. The ground of the image is an unspecified space occupied by these idealized children, but the work includes the specific ground of Paducah, home of the artist’s own circle. In Patterson-Marx’s work, the specifics of life—nursing your child, tending your garden, finding your town on the map—form tangible instances of the universal phenomena of life, and provide the gateway to forces that animate the connections—love, that is, in the broadest sense. As Annie Dillard goes on to point out, “I think it would be well…and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.” Patterson-Marx seems to approach the convergence of art and motherhood, creativity both literal and figurative, with that abandon. In many of her pieces, the breasts and the flood of milk or water overwhelm everything. Bunches of breasts crowd together and loom into the frame, and the drops of liquid fill it from side to side. However, the images of excess never seem threatening. “Milk Flood, House Submerged” shows a breast spraying down on a house turned upside down and dunked under stylized water. Behind the image runs the word “mama” written over and over. On one level the work recalls the way having a baby in the house disrupts everything. The incessant call of “mama” could come across as an assault, but Patterson-Marx seems to treat the entire experience as a thrill ride. All her work has a vertiginous quality, as the space between personal and universal evaporates, and past and present become identical. The female body is her body and the body of all; it is within the world, and it is the world. Taken together, these prints and mixed-media pieces create a vision of convergence and connection that would shame a peyote-munching mystic. Emily Holt enters into art-making with an equally strong sense of play. Her previous work has included toy-like creatures and pop-up books that seem to illustrate part of a dimly remembered story. Most of her work at TAG consists of small oil paintings, but they portray characters as whimsical, melancholy and odd as her other constructions. Like Patterson-Marx, Holt uses recurring figures and familiar elements. One figure in several of these pieces is a rabbit, or more like a child in a rabbit costume, recalling the fun, or humiliation, of a long-gone Easter get-up. In “Bunny,” for example, a kid’s face topped with white rabbit ears sneaks into the bottom of the picture. It shows Holt’s usual mixture of emotions, the boy ridiculous with his costume and little red cheeks, but forlorn, lost in the frame. Many of the figures are bloated, which makes it hard to decide whether you are looking at an anthropomorphized dog, bear or toad, a cartoon person, or an inoffensive monster. The resulting visual confluence establishes a world in which critters contain human spirit, humans have more than a bit of animal in them, and the distinctions between beings break down. “Disgruntled Bunny” shows a rabbit with an oversized head standing on two legs. It has a stern expression, conveyed with small lines that make up its pinched nose and mouth. Finding emotion in the creature suggests a deep solidarity across the natural world. Where Patterson-Marx’s pictures are fleshy in their overall appearance, Holt’s are gray and overcast. Her most realistic painting in the show, “Car Crash,” is a simple vignette of two cars hung on the guard rail of an otherwise empty stretch of road. The colors are those of an overcast day, where even the yellow of the dashed lines in the road has a custard tone. In this piece, the dread implicit in the gray skies and sad faces of many of the pieces manifests itself as an actual disaster. The show includes a few examples of Holt’s signature constructions. Three bits of molding serve as stages for menageries of tiny figures mounted on spools: shaggy bird-like creatures, heavy-set man-dogs in trapeze tights, devils in long cloaks—all on the miniature scale of finger puppets. These little creatures have enough personality to distinguish themselves as entities—not quite alive, but close enough to increase the stock of beings in the world. Any work of art is a new creation that expands the world. The sense of enriched community (or a mental ecosystem with greater diversity) is strongest with Holt’s 3-D figures, but the characters in her paintings have sufficient presence to extend this sense of expansion. While Holt’s acts of world-building depend on a sense of pervasive connection, she doesn’t have the same well-defined vision through which Patterson-Marx connects images and generations of experience. She is also less personally present in the work than Patterson-Marx, whose images of breasts represent women and their lives, but are also clearly her own breasts. The milk in her art is also the milk she feeds her son, and the children here are her son today and the boy he will grow up to be. Unlike Holt, Patterson-Marx places herself so firmly in the work that it verges on self-revealing performance art.