Sarah Lindley is an American ceramic sculptor, living and working in Michigan. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1996 and her MFA in Ceramics from the University of Washington in 2001. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art and manages the 3-D program at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Lindley’s work explores the “life of interior space” through distilled forms of furniture that are stripped of their color and contents. In reducing familiar objects of domestic space like a chest of drawers or writing desks to their basic “systems and structures,” she presents these spaces as places where collections and precious objects should be. In doing this, she not only evokes the objects or figurines that may dwell in their cubbies, but the lived space that actual furniture itself may inhabit. She describes her work as “similar to old memories” as “…waiting to be filled.”
The choice of color as well as the construction of her pieces reflect a vacancy and absence that simultaneously summon a psychological fullness and presence. Rather than glazing her work with an additional secondary surface, Lindley chooses specific clay bodies for the inherent qualities they possess. Her choice of color, shades of white and black, evoke a range of associations. Lindley describes whiteness as “absence, loss, void, and isolation,” and blackness as “both presence and absence.” Her work reciprocally considers the past and present, presence and absence, and permanence and impermanence.
Her ceramic work is predominantly slab built out of porcelain or colored stoneware. The nature of the slab construction and the clay itself produces a fluid kind of imperfection that calls into question the “stability and permanence” of such spaces and objects. In addition to clay, Lindley also works in wax, wood, salt, plaster and metal.
A recent exhibition, Poppenhuis:Rendering Domestic Display in 2006, is based on Dutch Cabinet Houses from the 17th and 18th centuries. These objects exist as “studies of the domestic environment” and as miniature versions of the places in which the cabinet houses themselves reside. They offer “…questions of gender, class, control, morality, mystery and beauty.”