Sara Swink: My Life in Clay

Links

• Add your name to my mailing list

  Add your name to my mailing list: http://eepurl.com/oElav to hear about upcoming shows and workshops. When you click on the link and type in your email address, make sure you click on "add contact to your address book" so that my emails don't end up in the spam folder.

• Artist Statement & Bio

• Visit My Online Shop

  SwinkShop offers new works as they become available for purchase. Click the orange heading above to visit.
  If you're local to the Portland area, you can opt to type in a code at checkout to save shipping costs and come by the studio to pick up your purchases.

• Featured on Oregon Art Beat

  The Art Beat folks were here filming for a segment that aired in October 2013 and which has since aired on PBS affiliates across the country.
  In this TV segment, I failed to thank my mentor-teacher, Coeleen Kiebert, for the immeasurable contribution she has made to my creative life. She invited me to teach using her creative process methodology, an approach I use in my own sculptural work and have taught in workshops since 2000. It is a rare thing when one person can influence so many others so profoundly in such a positive, life-affirming way, and Coeleen is such a person. She has had thousands of people in her classes, wrote and published "All of a Sudden: The Creative Process", and continues decades of work making, studying, and teaching art, creative process and the understanding of creative personality.

• Resumé

• Featured in Chinese Ceramic Arts Magazine

  I can't read Chinese, but I like the look of it!

• Art Doll Quarterly Article

• Featured in American Craft Magazine

  Here's the online version of the article, "The Stories Within", written by Carolyn Hazel Drake.

• Doodling

  This is the introduction to "If You Can Doodle, You Can Paint", a wonderful, beautifully designed book by Diane Culhane. In it, she expresses many of the ideas I've tried to share in my workshops about the value of doodling. In my workshops we often bring such ideas into and onto the clay. Doodling can loosen one up, playfully bring on new ideas, take the pressure off creating something "important". It's just a doodle, after all! But the innocent doodle can be the gateway to personal style, in fact, is an expression of one's style, while inviting further exploration and iteration, and a great way to get unstuck.

• Studio Handbook

  Some guidelines for working at Clay Circle Studio

• Swink Glazes Carrot Video

  This video details the decorating process on a piece titled "Carrot".

• Filled with the Spirit: Crafts Provide a Connection to the Sacred

  This article, given to me by a friend many years ago, makes a good case for art making as a spiritual practice.

• "Making a Wally" video

  A very quick demo with original music by my son, Bearsly.

• Kate Malone at Waddesdon Manor

  This is without a doubt the best ceramics video I've ever seen. It focuses on process: how she observes her environment for inspiration, her amazing documentation (think image journal/sketchbook), how she takes inspiration and transforms it through sketching into brilliant ideas in her own oeuvre (vocabulary & style), and some of the methods she uses, including sprigging and coiling, and adding hand-formed details. She talks about trusting the process and letting it inform her. And talk about test tiles!

• Article on How to Price Your Work

  Here's an analytical approach to pricing your artwork.

• Animals: Symbolic Meanings

• Ceramists Take Risks

• Sacred Geometry of Shrines Chart

• OPA - Oregon Potters Association

• Georgia OKeeffe: By Myself, BBC Documentary 2016

  Georgia O'Keeffe loved the motif of the unfurling stem/leaf and she seemed to zero in on it at the beginning and at the end of her painting life. It could be considered an essential mark of hers, what we talk about in workshops as a doodle.
  This BBC documentary of her life is great.

• An excellent film about Jean Michel Basquiat

  Basquiat is one of my artistic heroes. This is a great video about him and his art.

• Video: How to roll out flat tiles

  Helpful info about how to make tiles that will stay flat—an OPA workshop with Cathi Newlin and Dawn Panttaja.

• Video: Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim

  Born in Stockholm in 1862, Hilma af Klint began her artistic career as an academy-educated painter of naturalistic landscapes and portraits. Influenced by the spiritual movements and scientific discoveries of her era, however, af Klint soon strove to express abstract concepts beyond what the eye can see. She began creating radically abstract paintings in 1906, years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others would take similar strides to rid their own artwork of representational content. Yet while many of her better-known contemporaries published manifestos and exhibited widely, af Klint kept her groundbreaking paintings largely private.

  "Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future," the first major solo exhibition in the United States devoted to the artist, is on view October 12, 2018–April 23, 2019 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Learn more at |https://www.guggenheim.org/hilmaafklint|

• Video: Sacred Geometry of Shrines with Coeleen Kiebert

  My mentor Coeleen Kiebert (M.S., UCSC) discusses the archetypal meaning of shrines, temples & cathedrals.

• Video about my teacher, Coeleen Kiebert

  Coeleen eloquently describes her ceramic work over the decades and how she uses it for self-discovery.

• Kathy Ruttenberg, Where the Beasts Dwell

  Kathy has used the emotional turmoil of a difficult break up to generate an immense body of work in clay and really find herself in the process.

• Appointment with the Wise Old Dog: Dream Images in a Time of Crisis

  "I have studied and meditated on David Blum's extraordinary documentation of his dreams and inner work — the immense gifts that were given to him from his unconscious and poured into images and music. We are intrigued on all levels — emotional, imaginal, intellectual. Our hearts are split open as we watch the process of the inner marriage."
  —Marion Woodman

• Betty Woodman: Theatre of the Domestic

• Airbnb in West Linn

  Rates vary. You can contact Dru to negotiate a rate.

• Guest Room in West Linn

  On Instagram at @theguestroomwestlinn $150/night. 503-841-8423