Sarah Walton, sculptor

Practising as a potter in her Alciston workshop since 1975, Sarah Walton began her career throwing pots, but established her reputation making hand-built and press-moulded birdbaths, sculptural forms for the outdoors reminiscent of squared boulders standing on oak bases. In latter years, she has concentrated on creating smaller sculptures inspired by aspects of the landscape.

A lot of your pieces are rooted in nature…

Nature and landscape have always been central to my work. As a child growing up in London, I visited Sussex regularly: its soil, vegetation, and rural life thrilled me. Similarly, I got to appreciate the Lake District, with its stone walls, hills, rivers and clean air. Both were such a contrast to the city. Walking these landscapes and making drawings in both became part of my creative development.

What do you like about salt-glazed stoneware?

After initially studying painting, I found I got more excited by three dimensions. This led me to study ceramics at Harrow Art School, where salt glazing was being explored. Its firing process – dramatic and full of risky fumes – requires the potter’s close collaboration with flame and salt. I got hooked on that for the next 46 years. There is something a little austere about salt-glazed wares, but I’ve always tried to fuse that to its opposite, which is tenderness.

Tell us about your workplace.

My workshop is in the garden of a cottage in Alciston which my family rented for 25 years from 1950, for £25 a year. Its access was across two fields: there was no running water, electricity, or toilet. We used to spend the Easter and summer holidays there and it would then stand empty for the next eight months. In my late twenties, I asked my parents: ‘Could I try to be a potter there?’ They bought it and I’ve worked there ever since.

Why birdbaths?

It was a response to a crisis. After ten years of making thousands of pots, I got to a point of complete exhaustion. At the time, I interpreted this as a moment of failure but in retrospect it was a time of most precious change. I remember seeing a mountain tarn glistening like mercury through misty rain in dark mountains and saying to myself: ‘Yes, that’s what I want’. I began developing birdbaths, determined they’d be more sensuous than anything I’d made to date. It took years. My birdbaths became, essentially, vehicles for light and shade. I had to feel my way forward blindly. It felt a matter of life or death to get them right.

Which contemporary sculptors do you admire?

Each September I take part in Lewes Artwave, and this year I discovered Otto Gobey, a young sculptor from southwest Wales, through Instagram. I invited him to use my showroom and reorganised my workshop so I could display my work alongside pieces I was making during daily hour-long demos. It was a refreshing change, and I hope to do something similar next year, this time with ceramicist Angela Verdon from Derby. For me, she’s in the top echelon of ceramicists working in the UK today.

What led you to smaller-scale work?

At 74, a surgeon said I had to make significant changes to my lifestyle. I decided to give up making birdbaths and salt glazing. Instead, I went right down in scale. And that’s where I am now, at 80, most grateful to still be working, hoping and believing I can bring together all my years of working and now make pieces, fired in electric kilns, whose starting point is landscape. I see continuity through everything I’ve made: pots, birdbaths and now small sculptures. I’m in all of them.

Interview by Kate Reeve-Edwards

You can find Sarah on themakersdirectory.co.uk