Sarah is our Foundation year teacher and her expertise is in ceramics. At present she specialises in feisty performance works which show a sense of humour. She had brought some of her pots along.  She still does some ceramics (eg Geriatric Miniatures – a collection of miniature zimmer frames in porcelain)  She shares a Studio in an old ‘Keep’ in Reading with a community of artists. It is all open space and that means that the artists are not isolated, but they do live with the constant fear of eviction.

She showed us photos of her work at the moment,  which is often based on events and performance art. Works such as ‘Hipster Replacement’ and Vernacular Habitat at the B&B project space, Folkestone.

Big Boy was an inflatable Boy, which she designed and had made for her, for an exhibition at the Military Museum in Arborfield in 2014. The show was about military machines which she thought were like boy’s toy’s – hence Big Boy.

She designed a shop for the Whitley fine arts festival. The shop was called Soul Trader, and was a shoe shop. She had got the shoes from a sale, and adapted them into special shoes like ‘Dog Shoes’ or ‘tennis shoes’ with astro turf and such like.She wondered if people would engage with it, but it was a great success, and many people, especially children, came and tried the shoes on.

She has produced a series of works for a shopping center in Bracknell which is closed for refurbishment. One was a Signals Resourse project which was based on Navy  flag signals. Bracknell was the big ship sending out the signals. The signals were based on her own language though and full of humour. There have been several other projects including with a beautiful old red Light Ship.

Sarah did her art degree in England and then had a studio where she concentrated on Kitsh. She started by rolling out slabs and pressing them into molds. She also made cups and saucers using decals, which was quite successful.  She even got featured in a Canine Magazine for her dog ones!

After this period, she decided to do a  Masters in Ceramics at New York State College of Ceramics. It was here that she developed her  rebellious quirky style. For instance, she bought mugs from Hobby Craft and altered what they had on them, then put them into shops. She entered a mug design competition on won. She started designing her own mugs with her own slogans, and hung them on a mug tree which she had designed. There were all sorts of slogans and captions, including political. They were very popular.

For her degree show she went further she did not show her own work, but bought works form the School’s alumni which she showed as her own. Her reasoning was that as she’d bought it, she could use it as she liked, and this included exhibiting it as her own. The teachers did not agree, so she redid the whole exhibit including documenting and exhibiting all the bills, as she did not want to fail. The teachers were still not happy, but she received much support for her case from other students and teachers in other schools.

Over the years Sarah’s work has moved from ceramics to performance based art. She very much enjoys working with other people on projects as well as the networking aspect of it, and feels that if some of the work makes people uncomfortable, then being uncomfortable is not a bad place to be.