Sara Torgison (San Diego, CA b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus in ceramics and fiber art. She received an MFA from the University of Cincinnati Department of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning and a BFA (ceramics) and BS (Zoology) from Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, CA. Her work often blends media, extending finite and fragile surfaces to emphasize and inhabit marginal spaces. Strange alliances formed in passages between hard and soft substances are resonant of the shifts inherent in navigating public and private life, and the distance between self and other. Sara teaches ceramics at Queen City Clay, is seasonal faculty at the University of Cincinnati, and works as a preparator at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, OH.

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​"I am an interdisciplinary artist working in traditional land-based materials and sympoetic processes. Negotiating margins, predominantly between ceramic and fiber, underscores the physical, temporal, and psychic implications of intersection and transformation. Strange alliances form where hard and soft substances meet, merge, and become something new. Hand formed ceramic elements and accumulations of countless stitches pigmented through plant-based dye experimentation coalesce into works that reclaim labor, time, and attention as resources to be protected and wielded with purpose. Drawing on histories of both craft and fine art, the work reflects on the intimate, ephemeral relationships between humans and the materials we engage, foregrounding care, reverence, and interdependence.

Humans have co-evolved alongside plants, fungi, and other animals for millennia, but there is little felt cultural connection to previously essential land-based lifeways in a post-modern world. I work to complicate the contrived distance between humans and the ecosystems we inhabit by engaging ancestral craft practices. Shifting to more intentional, process based working methods and away from the frenzy of production at any cost allows me and the viewer to imagine and inhabit a more sustainable future. Our reliance on, and responsibility to our environment becomes more viscerally tangible through complex interweaving of unyielding ceramic and flexible fiber. Merging physical bodies to transit time and place, the human animal is sewn back into ecologically situated stories."-ST