Not everyone has a career path lined up when they leave school that then goes to plan. I always intended to study archaeology, and did for a brief time along with history and history of art at King Alfred’s College in Winchester. Life however got in the way, and I ended up in Texas pursuing a career in art and traditional music, something I’ve hugely enjoyed and have endeavoured to pursue ever since.
I studied at the Glassell School of Art in Houston, Texas between 1992 and 1995, majoring in Painting & Drawing under Jackie Tileston and Patrick Palmer. It was here that I got my first proper taste of ceramics (thumbpot hedgehogs at middle school aside), patiently taught by Bill Dennard who instilled in me a love of playing with clay.
These early pots were small pieces that explored surface texture, and I took a certain delight in trying to maintain thin walls to produce a delicate vessel. However as I was primarily studying two dimensional art at the time, ceramics was dropped after a year and a half and it would be ten years before I touched clay again.
At the end of 2000 I returned to the UK, and the following year began studying for a degree in Fine Art at Northumbria University. My focus was sculpture and I found myself based in the ceramics studio during the first year, creating and investigating a body of work that took inspiration from archaeology and mythology. Being back in a ceramics studio was one I enjoyed, but it didn’t occur to me to stay with clay as a medium at the time. There were further opportunities to pursue printmaking, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to grips with some of the more complicated printing processes than lino and woodblock had previously afforded me during my time in Texas.
I left university with a fascination for tiny time-based sculptures made from mundane materials, and primitive mark-making that encouraged the viewer to get close up to see the detail with the idea they’d wonder, and come to their own conclusions about the pieces rather than being spoon-fed a meaning. In essence I think I wanted to create my own archaeology.
Fast forward to the present, and after doing the artistic equivalent of wandering blindly round the desert for several years, occasionally producing the odd piece of work here and there, I’ve finally found my way back to clay. Opportunity has allowed me to dive headfirst and wholeheartedly back into something I’ve missed, and I feel like I’m now doing what I was always meant to. It’s a good feeling.
Sarah Lowes 