Studio Sessions
Material in Motion: Embodied Practice
with Sarah Christie
April 2025
About the Studio Session
Breathing, moving, listening, and dwelling can be strategies for making. In this Studio Session, we complicate the supposed boundaries of mind/body, subject/object, and consider what it means to have an embodied practice.
Who, what, or where are we embodying? Is clay the ‘body’, or is it us, the makers? Is clay an extension of a body? Could the material itself be a site or a facilitator? The marks and gestures we make in clay record our experience and reflect it back to us, but we can go much further. We will extend embodied practices beyond the sense of touch that we enjoy and value so highly, to incorporate movement practices, breath, and sound.
We will tune in to our environments and spaces, and our moving and being within them, to find new ways of making and knowing. We are relentlessly interrupted by events from outside and within ourselves, but could cultivating an awareness and respect for our own unmediated experiences show us how to continually begin again?
About the Lead Artist
Sarah Christie is a London-based artist, writer and educator. Her embodied practice uses clay as a primary, and primal, material for sensing, thinking, moving and making with. She invites correspondence and collaboration with other people, places, forms and materials, to create work that may be impermanent, interdisciplinary, slow-growing and cyclical. This ‘call-and-response’ approach aims to allow uncertainty and create space for unexpected outcomes to emerge.
Sarah has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including at London’s Southwark Cathedral, OVADA in Oxford, British Ceramics Biennial, and Industry City, Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Australian Ceramics, online zine ‘What About Clay?’ and in fellow artists’ exhibition catalogues. She teaches at Central Saint Martins, UAL, and is a visiting artist at Imperial College London and King’s College. In addition to numerous live workshops in educational settings, she has explored teaching and collaborating in digital space in alternative educational models. In 2020 she co-created Small Acts of Being with artist Heather Barnett, and in 2022 and 2023 she led studio sessions with AB Projects (USA).
Logistics
This session is scheduled for Saturdays April 5, 12, 19, 26 from 11am-1pm pst (that’s Los Angeles time).
Registration is $250 and includes all four sessions.
Participants gather via Zoom.