Tracing Ways

work by E. Saffronia Downing and Rosemary Holliday Hall

December 7, 2024 – January 5, 2025

On View Sundays
11 A – 2 p

Opening Reception

Saturday, December 7th
4 – 7 p

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.

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. Downing received her MFA in ceramics from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. She has received fellowships from the College of the Atlantic (2023), Lunder Institute of American Art (2022), and Oxbow School of Art (2021). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Downing recently moved to Newburgh, New York. 

@_saffr0nia_

Rosemary Holliday Hall is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work engages visual arts and natural sciences. Her current projects  focus on entomology, transformation, and the history of materials to explore ecological entanglements. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of multiple fellowships, and collaborative grants some of which include Taft Botanical Gardens Artist Researcher in Residence, Ex.Change: Artist and Scientist on Climate Change, University of Chicago Art, Science & Culture collaboration Grant, Leroy Neiman Oxbow Fellowship, and the Maria and Jan Manetti Shrem Royal Drawing School Fellowship. Hall currently lives and works in Ojai, California.

@rosemaryhhall