Join us in celebration of the opening of E. Saffronia Downing and Rosemary Holliday Hall’s exhibition, Tracing Ways.
“Walking is how the body measures itself against the earth.”
– Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
Traces of movement, join and disperse– sneakers sink in soft soil, paw prints scamper across the sidewalk, paths of wood-boring beetles embroider a fallen tree. We mark our cohabitation as we criss-cross the continent.
Tracing Ways, is a site-specific installation that draws attention to the tracks and traces of human and more-than-human cohabitants. Living on parallel coasts, collaborators Rosemary Holliday Hall and E. Saffronia Downing, convene at Comfort Station to weave together a collection of tracks gathered from their disparate environments.
For these transient artists, Tracing Ways becomes a stopover, referencing Comfort Station’s history as a space for travelers to pause as they moved through the city. Using clay as a recording device, Downing and Hall capture and suspend the ever-flowing motion of beings against the earth.
approx. 15 – 30 min performance
in collaboration with
Bret Schneider, piano
Mo Hayden and Kellyn Jackson, movement
A track feels like witnessing a ghost—an absent presence etched into the material landscape. In this performance, the path of burrowing beetles is transcribed into musical notation, then played by a player piano, as though by a spectral hand.
Two bodies lie on top of each other for a durational weight/wait share. In the undulation of total stillness, pressure leaves marks on each other’s skin.The body records the world - a slow reciprocal bonding with the earth.
E. Saffronia Downing is an artist and educator invested in craft processes, embodied research, and ecological thought. Downing forages local materials to create site-specific installations and sculptures.
@_saffr0nia_
Rosemary Holliday Hall is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work engages visual arts and natural sciences. Her current projects focus on insects, transformation, and the history of materials to explore ecological entanglements.
@rosemaryhhall