Going to Ground, 2024

Fabricated with steel and earthen soil blocks, Going to Ground offers an echo of Potter Atkins’ home that resonates with Boston’s contemporary realities. Based on an artistic rendering created from historical records, the sculpture stands at two-thirds the size of the original house. For the home’s roof awning, Rogers developed a unique “scarification” pattern which creates only partial shelter from the sun and rain, touching upon the current-day precarity of homeownership for Black and Brown communities in Boston and across the US. It also references the scar-like form and history of The Greenway itself, a park built over and upon the painful displacement of communities of color during the initial highway construction project. As part of this project, Rogers hosted an Open Call for Soil, an invitation to Boston’s communities to gather and contribute soil from spaces meaningful to them. Participants sent in soil from over 15 different states and countries, including Massachusetts, Virginia, California, Alaska, and Italy, among others. The collected soil was then used to craft the earthen soil blocks for the sculpture’s foundation, a gesture of collective support, communal residence, and tangible affirmation of Zipporah Potter Atkins’ life and story in Boston’s public memory.