Saffronia Downing: Pressed Flower

About this exhibition

« ACRE Projects presents Pressed Flower, a solo exhibition of new work by artist and researcher E. Saffronia Downing, opening Friday, August 14 from 6 – 9pm. Featuring ceramics with impressions taken from the natural environment, works on paper, and a tactile research table mapping her harvesting of native clays, Downing blurs boundaries between the outdoors and the domestic. She connects her personal history to the ecological memories of the land, forming a non-linear archive of place while concurrently revealing clay as a site-specific marker of geological, biological, and industrial impact. The artist pays homage to disappearing folk art traditions including quilting, tile-making, and bricklaying. In one such gesture, she embeds ceramic tiles into ACRE’s gallery walls, marking her first infrastructural intervention. Here, the inlaid tiles represent architectural building blocks, further solidifying the collapse between the natural world and built environment. Downing deepens her exploration of craft histories in a new body of work made for Pressed Flower, developed through ritual-like repetition. Day after day she takes impressions of a decorative floral tile lifted from the concrete outside of her home. The flower reveals itself through rubbings on paper woven into a quilt, pressings on soft clay, imprints fired and glazed. While the ceramics recall collections akin to those found in herbariums, the works on paper are reminiscent of gravestone rubbings, both reinforcing the connections between body, memory, and the earth. Together, these archival methods form an epistemology of plant life that uses ecological material as a tool for record-keeping.

via The Visualist