Sarah Mcintosh
Duration: September-October & November-December 2021
Using our program’s emphasis on exploration and focus when creating work, Sarah McIntosh will spend her three months in New Harmony researching scale and color. She will experiment with glazing and alternative processes/mediums to finish her sculptures with color in mind. Sarah will also work toward shifting scale, creating more dynamic forms, and researching abstraction though bigger mutations and less representational features in her sculpture.
quick facts
How many years have you been working as a clay artist? 2 years
What is your main clay body that you currently use? Stoneware. Recipe: 10% custer feldspar + 30% gold art fire + 30% Hawthorn Bond Fire + 30% OM4 ball clay.
What is the primary method you use for building your work? Flat coils and slabs
What is your favorite studio tool? Serrated metal rib
Do you have any future clay wishes or dreams? I wish just to get into more galleries, present my own workshop and to be able to keep doing what I'm doing.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My current collection of sculptures consists of human heads and hands enveloped in flora. I’m combining the representations of human interrelation and flora within the space of ceramic sculpture. I’ve chosen heads and hands to express human connections through touch, and I pinch each petal to activate the flora and leave an impression. The use of ceramic stains promotes the appearance of touch under the glaze. The flora interrupts, corrupts, and consumes the insides, pushes out of the orifices and blooms across the skin. The flora leaves the human objects stiff in rigor mortis, allowing it to flourish. It connects some of the recognizable features of the human parts together, binding them in death.
As the body parts die the flora grows stronger; the flora here suggesting rebirth of the human object and memories. The flora expunges the insides of the heads removing the gray matter that contains memories and emotions and replaces it with new vitality and growth. Most works are conjoining of the human head as objects to demonstrate the communal existence and how one’s life is not just their own but affects many others. Representational features lean and touch each other, forming a relationship, a new form that questions our notion of autonomous power. The flora propagates hope as it grows from the decay. The flora itself is overtly fleshy pink which evokes vulva imagery, heightening the concept of rebirth and reminds us that death is not the end.
BIOGRAPHY
BORN: Marion, INdiana | USA
Sarah McIntosh is a ceramic artist living in Bloomington, Indiana. In 2020, she obtained her BFA degree in Ceramics and a minor in Art History from Indiana University where she was awarded Nick's English Hut Ceramics Award and Genia and Max Tanner Scholarship. She also enjoys painting and printmaking, especially intaglio, but her preferred medium has always been clay.
Sarah’s work is inspired by her interest in macabre, body horror media and real-life abnormalities which she intersects with the notion of human interrelation. These impulses thrive most prominently in her hand-pinched flora that propagates in her work. She hand builds using slabs and pinching, where the pinch activates the concept of human touch and connection. Human oddities and skin diseases are influences that help guide the sculpture's form and how the flora develops. Sarah’s signature flora uses both floral and flesh references to converge beauty and the grotesque, pushed further into the grotesque by its mutilation of the human form, acting like a disease. Sarah has a special interest in this body of work because of her own experience with incurable skin diseases, which shapes her curiosity about the natural anomalies of the human form.