Draumr wants to be the connection between interior dreamers and talented craft makers. That's why we represent different creators who are all equally talented. Some are still making their way, others are already more established names. We will introduce the makers to youin a series of blogs. Today we are introducing Sarah Michaels. Sarah is a proven artist in the field of ceramics. Her colorful vases, tableware and statues are often funny too.
Introducing Sarah Michael.
Sarah was born in the turbulent 1960s in Nottinghamshire, England. After high school she attended an Art Foundation course at Nottingham Polytechnic. There she chose the direction of textile design. She started this course because they were specifically looking for students who liked fluorescent pink. And it was a good base of the pure humor of Liverpool! Perhaps her colorful and humorous foundation has already been laid there.
After her education, she traveled for a year through Asia and Australia, where she held various jobs. For example, she was designing uniforms for restaurants and theaters and packaging cake mixes. On her journey she discovered that textile design is not really her passion.
In Indonesia she met her future Dutch husband and moved to the Netherlands in 1987, where she still lives and works. After realizing during her journey that fashion/textile design was no longer her purpose in life, she accidentally discovered during a pottery course from the famous Dutch potter Wim Borst that potting was the medium she was looking for. Sarah enjoyed pottery so much that she started looking for work in a pottery to learn the trade properly. She found throwing pots meditative, challenging and exciting. To master throwing, Sarah worked for 4 years as a production thrower in a pottery in Leiden. There she had to produce thousands of the same model. That's good for getting the hang of throwing, but not really exciting. After that extremely repetitive but educational experience, she started working for herself, determined to make everything as different as possible. It took many years of experimenting with different ideas and techniques before she found the image she was looking for.
What does Sarah make.
The search for her passion resulted in colorful earthenware and porcelain pieces that are objects for her to express her humor, but also with the necessary thought-provoking undertones.
Sarah herself says: “It is fun to make and a pleasure for the user to live with. My work is my passion and I hope you can feel that when you use it.”
The ceramic technique of throwing clay is Sarah's passion. Her 'unique' approach is that she tries to make everything on the potter's wheel, regardless of the shape. All her pieces are constructed from many thrown pieces of clay, cut into pieces and joined together to create a three-dimensional canvas. A canvas covered in a spectrum of bright, cheerful colors. The statue is then fired three times with a transparent glaze and chandeliers and is therefore also suitable for outdoor use.
“I've been making things for as long as I can remember. At school I made crazy knitted jumpers to sell to my friends and that's probably why I decided to study fashion and textiles at Liverpool Polytechnic. I only really became interested in ceramics when I came to the Netherlands and I am very happy that I did, because it still makes me very happy every day.” Sarah says.
Sarah often gets ideas while cycling.
Then she has seen something or someone somewhere and suddenly she knows what she wants to make. Sarah then thinks about how she wants to achieve this while cycling. It could be a situation she found herself in, for example somewhere in a waiting room, on the train or behind her stall at a ceramics market. Sarah often brings some humor into it. She wants her images to have a positive image that makes people happy every day.
But she also draws inspiration from other exhibitions. For example, she once went to an exhibition by Grayson Perry. There she noticed a few cracks in his amazing signature vases which she found quite inspiring. Especially since they now fetch around £700,000 each! She finds it inspiring that it proves that even with cracks it can still be perfect. For example, she also enjoys the humor in the work of Beryl Cook. The same kind of humor that she likes to incorporate into her own work.
Female sculptures with humor.
If fluorescent pink appeared in ceramic body stains, you can bet Sarah would use it. That color is hidden by her history of training in Liverpool. In addition to the use of color, the female sculptures are also a recurring aspect. Sarah creates the stereotypical images of modern girls. They are trendy, hip, sexy and naughty and often find themselves in uncompromising situations. Such as indulging in an entire box of chocolates and often wearing the wrong shoes. Sarah gets a lot of inspiration just by looking around her and of course at herself. All her pieces are created with humor in mind and the necessary thought-provoking undertones.
Check out Sarah's work on Draumr via this link.