What can a handful of dirt tell you about where you live? At ACRE Projects in Chicago, the Bad at Sports crew joins ceramic artist E. Saffronia Downing amid her exhibition Pressed Flower to talk about wild clay, the material memory of cities, and what happens when people are invited to mail you their dirt.
For Call for Clay, Downing issued open invitations in 2023 and 2025 for participants to send foraged clay, along with letters about where it came from. Published by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the resulting book brings together 40 contributors from 19 states and three countries. Part correspondence project, part material archive, it is a portrait of the places we carry around with us—even when they arrive in a Ziploc bag.
The conversation moves from Chicago's common bricks and a stream beneath Downing's family home in Baltimore to a mysterious flower-or-gear pressed into an upstate New York sidewalk. There are hand-pinched beads that are also seeds, ceramic tiles embedded in gallery walls, the environmental ethics of taking dirt from the ground, and the industrial operations hidden behind the humble bag of studio clay. Add some kiln-shelf anxiety, colored-pencil drawing on fired ceramics, and an inconclusive effort to determine whether everything is sculpture, and you have a pretty good afternoon at Bad at Sports.
Names Dropped:
E. Saffronia Downing – https://e-saffronia.net/
Ryan Peter Miller – https://ryanpetermiller.com/about
Duncan MacKenzie – https://badatsports.com/broadcast-staff/duncan-mackenzie/
Brian Andrews – https://www.brianandrews.org/
Katherine (Kitty) Ross – https://www.saic.edu/profiles/faculty/katherine-ross
Amber Ginsburg – https://www.amberginsburg.com/
Lisa Frank – https://lisafrank.com/
Pressed Flower – https://acreresidency.org/index.php/exhibition/pressed-flower
Call for Clay – https://i-n-g-a.com/products/call-for-clay-by-e-saffronia-downing
ACRE Projects – https://acreresidency.org/
School of the Art Institute of Chicago — Ceramics – https://www.saic.edu/ceramics
Bad Water Gallery (Field Dug Over listing) – https://locatearts.org/exhibitions/knoxville/field-dug-over
John Michael Kohler Arts Center – https://www.jmkac.org/
Bad at Sports / Bad at Sportscenter – https://badatsports.com/
Lumpen Radio (WLPN-LP) – https://lumpenradio.com/
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago – https://mcachicago.org/
Wissahickon Valley Park – https://fow.org/
Mason Stains — Mason Color Works – https://www.masoncolor.com/mason-stains
Trapper Keeper — Mead – https://www.mead.com/trapper-keeper-details/
Google Maps – https://www.google.com/maps
