Sarah Knight
they/them
Houston, TX + St. Louis, MO, USA
Sarah Knight is transgender artist and educator living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. They grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and received their BFA from Mills College. They hold an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. They have been awarded several residencies, including Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, Jentel Foundation, and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Knight was one of two Whitaker Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Craft Alliance in St. Louis. Their first solo exhibition opened at Foundry Art Centre in Saint Charles in April of 2022. They are currently planning a second solo exhibition for 2024 at Northern Clay Center, MN. They recently received an Artist Support Grant from the Regional Arts Commission of Saint Louis to support the development of new work.
“Is all matter intrinsically queer in a state of transformation? By blurring boundaries between stone, clay, and queerness, I hope to reveal the power of the unidentifiable. By fusing artificial and natural materials in the kiln, I work to dissolve cultural value systems placed on art, clay, and identity. As a transgender artist, my experience and practice embody the continual metamorphosis of the queer community. I recreate the earth’s entropic processes in a ceramic kiln, speeding up geological time. The finished work allows me to build a queer reality using artifice and deception as a defense mechanism and safe space.”
How does your work relate to the theme transformation— How does the work translate joy into strength?
"This piece embodies my effort to uplift fragments, discards, and inert matter deemed non-productive or useless. This piece literally and figuratively centers the beauty of waste products of a bigger process, of a state of flux frozen in time. My ceramic work itself seeks to bring power to the process of becoming by honoring the state of trans-materiality. To me, this is the undeniable and completely unique joy of being queer and transgender in an age where product and familiarity dictate identity and value. Happily suspended in a state of transformation, this little iridescent slag glass chunk holds space for its own identity outside of function.
My practice as a whole focuses on the literal and figurative presence of ‘flux,’ both a ceramic ingredient and a metaphor for perpetual entropy and identity. By tying queerness to the ceramic process, material, and the earth, the work that I make often suspends objects in animate transformation."
"Etymology plays a central role in my art practice, and many of my titles refer to geological processes, poems, or definitions of words. These titles and research are meant to disrupt value hierarchies in identity and naming, and place more power in the hands of process and transmutation. ‘Slag’ was made using a found fragment of glass slag from the National Building Arts Center in Sauget, IL. Slag, being ‘refuse matter from smelting,’ is literally the discarded remnants of an industrial process. It's also evolved to talk about identity and gender in relation to value - ‘slag’ is slang specifically used to describe women.
The symbolism and etymology of slag itself not only plays on how we value identity, but how root words can be reclaimed, like ‘queer’ has been for my community."
Anything else you would like to share about this work?
This can be an important part of the process, sourcing materials, or research.
"Slag", Found glass slag from Sauget, IL; chain, ceramic, powdered steel glaze, commercial glazes 11.5" x 7" x 3", 2023