Tracing Ways
2024clay, earthenware, player piano, porcelain, risograph print, stoneware, textile
Collaborative Exhibition
with E. Saffronia Downing
Player piano collaboration with Bret Schneider
Comfort Station
Chicago, IL
image credit: Mikey Mosher
“Walking is how the body measures itself against the earth.”
– Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A Brief History of Walking
– Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A Brief History of Walking
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.
Collaboration with Bret Schneider porcelian & player piano
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.
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