"I love making things. I believe objects can have value, usefulness and meaning. But I am also increasingly aware that making more things participates in the very system of extraction and consumption that I am questioning."

Sarah Ziessen is an artist and teacher working primarily with clay.

Alongside her fine art practice, Sarah makes micro-batch pottery, exploring the interplay between surface and form while creating objects that are both visually engaging and genuinely useful. She is interested in the particular qualities of handmade objects; the evidence of the hand, the small variations and imperfections—and in how these qualities can coexist with functionality.

Her fine art practice is increasingly informed by the cultural moment of polycrisis: a period of overlapping ecological, social and economic crises that calls into question the ways we live, make and consume. Her work considers the need for new frameworks for living within the Earth's ecological limits, and asks what a meaningful material practice might look like in a post growth economy.

As a potter, Sarah is confronted daily by the material realities of making: the extraction of clay and minerals, the energy required to transform them, the production of objects and the systems of consumption in which those objects circulate. This has led her to question her own position as a maker and to examine the ways in which creative practice can both challenge and reproduce the capitalist status quo. Her work sits in this tension: She does not see making as inherently good; nor does she want to abandon the pleasure, usefulness and meaning that objects can hold. Instead, she is interested in what responsible making might look like: whether we can make fewer things, make them well, value them differently, and consider more carefully why they need to exist at all.

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