"Down to Earth: Artists Create Edible Landscapes" is taking place in the center's indoor gallery and at its nearby "Second Site," a small farm down the road from the center. Organized by Amy Lipton, a New York-based curator whose expertise is in environmental art, it presents the efforts of seven artists who explore landscape, sustainability, growing, and recycling in their work, and in very diverse ways.

Stacy Levy's Kept Out is the formalist, and also the most successful effort, of this show. Its brilliant metallic blue poles interlaced with wires is first and foremost an artwork, not a project. With the voracious local deer prevented from entering Levy's enclosure, all manner of weeds have grown to maturity, a verticality that's emphasized by the mown grass around her piece.

Knox Cummin, Ann Rosenthal, and Steffi Domike's Not Drain Away is the edifying work here - and clearly must have been quite good-looking earlier, before its kitchen garden bolted and its giant sunflowers began to nod, using Cummin's system of conserved water (stored in tower-mounted whiskey barrels) for sustenance.

The most conceptually interesting (and visually appealing piece at the time I saw the show last week) is Joan Bankemper's earthwork, Willa, a Medicinal Garden, an herb garden planted in the exaggeratedly feminine form of the Venus of Willendorf, in which Bankemper has planted herbs that will heal various parts of the human body in their corresponding areas. It's a piece that brings both Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Ana Mendieta's body imprints to mind, but is vividly alive.

Two works - by Simon Draper and the Habitat for Artists Collective, and Susan Leibovitz Steinman - occupy the farmland territory of this property, and both incorporate recycled materials. Draper's Drawn to/Drawn from the Garden, made in collaboration with Todd Sargood, E. Odin Cathcart and Cathy Lebowitz, is a potting shed incorporating a mini-art studio and surrounded by seven small vegetable and flower gardens.

Steinman's "Urban Defense" features raised beds of layered reused household materials (what permaculture gardeners refer to as "lasagna"), diverse compatible plants that conserve water and soil, and a facade of a columned plantation house constructed from found materials.

Larger than life

No timid, less-is-more stuff in this show. You're asked to navigate your way around 15 larger-than-life vessels on waist-high pedestals. It's as if you've been transported from Swarthmore to an undisturbed archaeological site near Tulum, but one where the ancient Mayans somehow came into contact with avant-garde early Christians.

The resemblance of Daley's unglazed "Vesica" vessels to Mesoamerican pottery and Christian stonework is no accident. The vesica form of overlapping arcs that Daley builds with slabs of clay is the three-dimensional version of the image of two intersecting circles, a universal symbol of unity that was studied by the Pythogoreans, among others, and can be seen in the art and design of many ancient cultures (a vesica pattern decorates the cover of the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, England). Some of his taller vessels, which are shaped like male torsos, also suggest the stylized public architecture and heroic carved sculpture of the 1930s. Daley makes his own grog - ground fired-clay particles - and mixes it in with his clay before firing it, which gives the surfaces of his sculptures an invitingly tactile, gritty texture; he creates other textures and indented patterns by pressing objects and materials into damp clay.

Daley has always been an admired ceramic artist, and "Vesica Explorations" shows the artist, now 84, making some of the most inventive and physically challenging work of his career.