August 2024: Sara Swink Ceramic Sculpture

Sara Swink makes clay human and animal figures with a psychological stance. Her hand-built sculptural work imparts ideas through fragments of narrative often with a humorous edge. “I often use collage to gather inspiration, recombining and developing ideas through sketching on paper and in clay.” She incises into a gritty sculptural clay, bisque fires, finish with oxides, underglazes and glazes then firing to cone 5/6.

About This Body of Work “As the pandemic was winding down and I was transitioning out of solitude, I made a collage to invite the unconscious perspective. This led to a series of horse sculptures that culminated in this body of work. The horses led me through a period of gradual reconciliation with myself and others. They were playful and offhand, allowing me to take things more lightly, recognize feelings of inadequacy, let go of perfectionism and connect in a more relaxed way with people in my studio.

Further collage work and the progression of pieces revisited the theme of predator and prey, with cat and horse archetypes standing in for aspects of my own human psyche. In the next phase, surface treatments of naively painted animals seemed to suggest the bubbling instinctual creative wellspring within. This felt like the completion of a cycle.”