Lorine Niedecker verse in wee box, by Margot Ecke.

Stacks of brick and planks of lumber juxtaposed with the names of flowers. The papery honeycomb matrix of a beehive. A Girl Scout badge. A World War II vintage German glass eye. A pine cone. The idea of collecting or cataloging as a form of expression may sound counter-intuitive. Collection, after all, is about taking things in, just a shade of meaning away from hoarding. But there's no denying that the things that people collect tell stories about the collector. In that sense, a collection can speak volumes.

Shelly DiCello and Margot Ecke collect and catalog different types of things in Bittersweet, their show now on view at Zygote Press. For DiCello - whose dark intaglio prints jumble stacks of bricks with uniform palates of lumber, all mingling among dark clouds and gestural, scratchy lines - it seems to be about construction and quantity, and (considering the inclusion of place names, flowers and seasons) about the idea of place. The collected items Ecke shows are of a more intimate nature: small objects, each precious to her for a different reason, which together create a portrait of a person.

Ecke grew up in Connecticut, and she says her collection of small objects is expressive of her own identity and family identity. She created a space - an oak desk on a woolen rug with a pattern of deep red, brown, blue and a bit of gold - that feels like a little island of a New England den in the midst of Zygote's bright white gallery. There's an old manual typewriter on the desk; she used it to hammer out the text of poems and fragments of letters she uses to help illuminate her collections of objects.

The things she's collected are semiprecious to her, from a beehive she found and picked up simply because it was beautiful, to her Girl Scout badge, to a little tin car, which she says was owned by a little boy. There's a lock of her hair, paired with a fragment of text from a letter Emily Dickinson wrote to accompany a gift of her own hair. There are collections of buttons. There's a small brass, glass-topped container of watch gears.

Each of these objects has had its import amplified in a couple of ways - first by the act of collection itself. An insignificant pine cone, rescued from the forest floor, becomes a treasure. Ecke has taken the process further by enshrining each little object of memory in a custom handmade box. She made the paper that the boxes are made of. She printed the papers with a plaid pattern evocative of New England. The boxes themselves are like bits of sculpture, specific to each object, and cradling it in a form-fit cavity.

Intaglio print by Shelly DiCello.

If this were fiction, it would be easy and interesting to create portraits of people by the things they could be imagined to collect. A portrait of a young girl, or of a young boy, or of an old man all could tell details of their lives in the same way as a cart full of groceries at the check-out line. But this is not fiction. Ecke is playing for emotional keeps. Except for a few items she found on eBay - like the glass eye, which is its own kind of treasure - these are items that speak of her life. This doesn't go without some pain. As Ecke observes, the first of these items to sell was one that she had the longest, a Girl Scout badge from her youth. As she says, she has to learn to let go. A bittersweet sale, indeed.

DiCello has cataloged bits of her life, too, but her autobiographical expression is scratched into plates to make intaglio prints. These are overwhelmingly dark, in blacks and greys with some tea-colored inks and occasional reds or a scratch of white lettering. Especially in four large prints, lines are piled up and crossed over other lines as a context for what she documents in arrangements that have something in common with notebook doodling. There are uniform stacks of bricks and lumber that seem to be as much about experimenting with line and perspective as they are about the heavy construction they also evoke.

As dark as these large prints are, a deeper look into them reveals something hopeful. A wide landscape print has pine seedlings seeming to grow on a steep slope of built-up lines. There are stacked bricks and red structures that looks like greenhouses. The seedlings seem both defiant and inevitable.

Another large print has a lot of brackets of the kind used to collect expressions of higher math. They are repeated in sets, as if they were being practiced. They're filled with dark blots of ink like clouds. Meanwhile, across the paper, are lists of flowers - snapdragons, violets, zinnias, cosmos, delphinia, hollyhock. Then there are the postal abbreviations of state names which follow DiCello - who has degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design, and teaches at the University of Georgia - to all those chapters of her adult life.

All the works in this exhibit resonate with deep back stories and reward deeper examination. Bittersweet takes the idea of collecting and cataloging out of the library or the stockpile, and into the realm of active communication.

Bittersweet: Margot Ecke and Shelly DiCello: Through June 14 at Zygote Press, 1410 E. 30th St., 216.621.2900.