Sarah Christie
Location
About
Sarah Christie
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, and materials, to create work that may be impermanent, interdisciplinary, slow-growing and cyclical. This ‘call-and response’ approach welcomes uncertainty and creates space for unexpected outcomes to emerge.
Sarah has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in the UK and internationally. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Australian Ceramics, online zine ‘What About Clay?’ and in exhibition catalogues. She teaches at Central Saint Martins, UAL, and is visiting artist at Imperial College and King’s College London. She also teaches and collaborates in digital space and alternative educational models, such as AB Projects.
Robyn Phelan
Robyn Phelan is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist. Grounded in studio ceramics, her sculpture and installations encompass drawing, writing, curating, exhibiting, and collective critical engagement. Using ‘hand-sense’ and ‘attuned-focus’, she creates dialogue and perspectives around materiality, process, time and affect found at her various sites of making. Robyn’s practice seeks to experience the world as embodied and connected. From this perspective she folds making, teaching and collaboration as a way to realise the potential of contemporary ceramics.
Robyn received her PhD (2024) in the field of contemporary craft and material research from RMIT University where she was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Art (Ceramics) (2010). She has exhibited widely in Australian museums and galleries and has over 20 years of experience in education, currently lecturing in ceramics, history and cultures and professional practice in the School of Art, RMIT University. Robyn has been writing critically about contemporary art and craft since 1997.
Artist Statement
Sarah Christie (UK) and Robyn Phelan (Australia) will discuss our long-distance collaboration originating from our sensory, embodied approaches to clay, and share the opportunities, challenges and rewards of working together yet remotely.
Working collaboratively moves us into a process of call and response that extends from our own reciprocal relationships with clay to a wider practice of correspondence. Leaving ideas of fixed outcomes behind, this journey leads to indeterminate outcomes. Rather than shy away from the discomfort that this may imply, we embrace the uncertainty and adventure that comes from allowing new entry points to making.
Correspondence is a conceptual as well as a practical lens: much as clay responds better and shows us more when we co-create with it, rather than force it, collaboration pushes us towards outcomes that may be expansive, unexpected, or impermanent, inhabiting the edges of contemporary ceramic practice.
Importantly, we find this to be an artistically enriching journey, taking us off well-worn paths and into areas of practice we may not otherwise access. We propose collaboration as one way to create a sustainable practice. Instead of time and space being a barrier, we have gained energy and momentum from corresponding across time zones, seasons, and cultures.