Sarah Gery

Sculptor, Potter, Painter, Glaze Chemist

I'm Sarah! I'm a 22 year old artist from Bucks County, Pennsylvania and recently graduated from the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan (BFA '24). I mainly create pottery, oil paintings, ceramic mosaics and sculptures, all with a deep consideration for the impacts of my art practice on the health of the environment. I utilize repurposed materials like ceramic glaze waste, wood scraps, broken pottery, and paper whenever possible in my artwork. I also work with natural, foraged materials such as wild clays, plant ashes, and crushed rock specimens in some of my sculptural ceramic mosaics. My work is heavily inspired by the natural world and carries through my deep adoration for the earth and its stories through deep time up to the present moment. My love of traveling around the country by RV fuels my landscape-painting and wild clay glaze-making. My paintings depict moments I have lived in places I have visited; my sculptural wild clay ceramics are tied to the geology of the landscape through material, which is therefore, inherently present in the work. Please contact me with any questions you may have about my work! :)

BFA Thesis Exhibition: Wounded Ground

Open-pit mines have no mercy for our environment; they clear-cut forests and displace ecosystems, leach toxic metals into nearby water sources, and carve massive, anthropogenic scars into earth’s surface. The ceramics industry is an avid consumer, and frequent squanderer, of raw materials extracted from these mines. In an effort to challenge the sustainability of the global mining industry, I create my own ceramic glazes and clays from found and recycled materials like rocks, wild clays, plant ashes, glass shards, and ceramic glaze waste. "Wounded Ground" utilizes these glazes by depicting open-pit mines that supply materials for the ceramics industry, as well as the environmental and social issues that propagate from them.
As an artist working primarily with found, raw materials, I strive to reach a point of complete self-reliance with my material gathering and processing. My work would not be possible without the hours spent hiking trails and scanning the ground, collecting rocks and digging clay samples; the time spent crushing rocks, sifting, milling, and refining powders, and mixing thoughtfully-crafted glaze recipes, each backed by chemistry. This process is truly a labor of love, but it’s a necessary endeavor for the health of the earth.