Sarah Cooling
Influenced by the beautifully rugged landscape of St Ives, home of the artists community where Sarah grew up and later her move near to Limoges famous for it’s hard paste porcelain and Medieval and Renaissance enamel, where she lived for many years, Sarah became interested in all aspects of the arts from an early age. On her return to West Penwith, she was able to spend some time at Leach Pottery during a residency and developed her practice with wheel throwing during her BA (Hons) Art and Design with Plymouth University, where she obtained a first class honours degree.
The translucency of porcelain and its fragile and delicate quality enables Sarah to create a visual narrative of how nature touches us and reminds us of our symbiotic interconnectedness to the landscape. Working from her studio at Krowji in Redruth, she endeavours to create forms that evoke a sense of curiosity, not only with form specifically but also with finishes by using textured surfaces, layered slips, glazes and oxides that create metallic accents. Often fired several times she adds additional layers between each firing to create a sense of timelessness, stillness and presence.
Sarah has exhibited throughout Cornwall, Devon and also in the Midlands and more recently has sold to London Designer The Water Monopoly.
‘Sarah Cooling’s delicate porcelain ceramics are at once precarious whilst exhibiting a profundity of layered methods and meaning. Therefore the nature surrounding her in the west Penwith is a clear source of inspiration - in her work we can see the skeletons of dried leaves, broken egg shells, dimpled rained-on sand, the sway of wild grasses and of course the surface of the moon: the fleeting beauty of these natural objects are frozen in her porcelain and offered, softly to us. Her work is as much about the human experience as that of the natural world. The translucency of her porcelain, the light refraction of her glazes belies a search to reflect the ephemerality of human essence. In doing so she reminds us of our essential interconnectedness with nature: it’s and our precariousness and fragility: our fleeting moments, distilled, held, seen.’ Kate Reeves-Edwards (Art Journalist)
