Correspondence with Clay
with Sarah Christie / February 2022
About the Studio Session
Anthropologist Tim Ingold writes that correspondence “is to catch ideas on the fly, in the ferment of their incipience, lest they be washed away with the current and forever lost.” Correspondence is a process-oriented, open-ended, reciprocal act of back and forth, side to side, in and out, through and to. When we work with clay, we are in a constant state of correspondence: the material receives our imprints, and it marks us in return. Clay is also in regular correspondence with elements such as fire, water, and air; actions such as friction, compression, or dissolution; and daily human rituals as simple as drinking, cooking, or washing our hands. Through a series of singular and collaborative prompts—from elements and actions to images and words—this Studio Session will explore working with clay as an emergent act of ‘call and response.’
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. Her most recent show this summer was as part of the collective Associated Clay Workers Union in London.
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.