Studio Sessions

Materializing Resistance

with Sarah Christie

February 2023

About the Studio Session

Making resistance material is essential, otherwise we would be smothered by systems, defaults, and stereotypes. There is much to resist; in this Studio Session we explore our own conditions of resistance and ways to utilize them in pursuit of agency and innovation. Resistance is generative; to say no is to make space for yes.

Resistance is an act of:

  • Awareness, attention, enacting (even if the action is very small, invisible to others, or inaction)

  • Rest and caring for

  • Curiosity and empathy

  • Remembering

Making is an act of resistance because:

  • It is slow and frequently unprofitable

  • The process is uncertain and unpredictable

  • Checking the 'decline all cookies’ box is not necessary

  • It allows us to change and to be changed

Making in clay is an act of resistance because:

  • Clay resists time

    • i.e. pottery sherds store the memory of ancient human bodies and stories

    • i.e. that reclaim bucket contains all times at once, ready to be remade

  • Clay accepts but also, eventually, resists the maker

  • Clay demands our acceptance of failure

 (A partial list) 

About the Lead Artist

Sarah Christie is an artist and educator working in clay. She is interested in the entangled and sensorial relationship we have with clay, and the tension between clay as resource, relic, and ongoing geological process. Not everything becomes a finished piece of work, but instead contributes to a longer, emergent process of revealing and informing. Recent work has been site-specific and ephemeral, often collaborative, sometimes inviting public participation. In 2019 she showed a large public work in London’s Southwark Cathedral. In 2020 she co-founded ‘Small Acts of Being’ with artist Heather Barnett, focused on making time and space for experimentation and play. She has recently shown work as part of the collective Associated Clay Workers Union in London. She is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors.

Sarah is Associate Lecturer on the ceramics program at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and visiting artist and supervisor at Imperial College London Medical School. She also leads visual arts and creative reflection workshops in public and educational spaces.

Logistics

This session took place in February 2023.