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 and Bio

  I make human and animal clay figures with a psychological stance. My hand-built sculptural work imparts ideas through fragments of narrative, often with a humorous edge. I use collage to gather inspiration, developing ideas through sketching. one idea leads to another in an endless progression of personal narrative that reflects and feeds my inner life. I use a gritty sculpture clay, incise into the clay, bisque fire, finish with oxides, underglazes and glazes, then fire to cone 5/6.

  My love of clay began at an early age with the encouragement of a neighbor who was a potter. In high school, I learned throwing and hand-building. Twenty years later I resumed classes, including a workshop with a teacher whose methodology fuses artmaking with the psychology of the creative individual, and whose approach I teach. I also pursued an academic art education at Bay Area schools through the first year of graduate study in ceramics. I taught at California venues and in my own studio, while participating in regional shows. In 2006, I moved to the Portland area, where I established Clay Circle Studio, and continue to show nationally and teach locally. In 2013, I was featured on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s “Oregon Art Beat.”

• Visit My Online Shop

  SwinkShop offers new works as they become available for purchase.
  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.

• Swink Glazes Carrot Video

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

• "Making a Wally" video

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

• OPA - Oregon Potters Association

• 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