The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Sarah Allwine grew up running around The Factory—the six-car garage turned family-business-production hub beside her family home. Before Allwine can remember, her family moved from Thousand Oaks, California, where she was born, to Easton, Connecticut, where her parents launched a business making coconut-fiber car-floor mats. The Factory became a place of both work and play for Allwine, her twin, and their three older siblings: they could either help (earning 25 cents for every reloaded bobbin till they got bored) or entertain themselves, inventing games in the woods, watching movies, and dipping into bulging Ziploc bags of markers and colored pencils, drawing everything from imagined fairy worlds to traced VHS covers that became defacto coloring pages.
Memories and Dedication
Growing up, Allwine heard stories over and over recounting her older siblings’ memories of California. This oral storytelling, along with the finite family archive of VHS tapes, music, and other recorded media, became a way for Allwine to connect with her siblings (the oldest being ten years older than her) and the memories they had not shared in real time.
Allwine’s family moved roughly every ten years—ten years in California, ten years in Connecticut, then onto North Carolina, where she lived for almost a decade before beginning undergraduate studies in painting at New York University (NYU). She knew she wanted to pursue art, already having taught herself to oil paint (and in the process, learning how to properly ventilate her makeshift studio space by necessity), practicing with the same dedication she’d learned competing in cross country and track.
Allwine always had a romantic confidence that she’d end up in New York City. She remembers, “It goes back to Mary- Kate and Ashley Olsen being in New York. We used to visit when I was younger, but I always just knew—I’m going to New York and then I can figure something out.” Just as she only had a second-hand memory of California via her family’s stories, she understood New York and its potential through the media fantasies of sitcoms and magazines.
Refining and Developing
Allwine fell into ceramics, describing her undergrad ceramics studio as a place where everyone was having fun, while the painters were serious and competitive. Kathy Butterly, one of Allwine’s first ceramics professors, empowered students to experiment with everything available to them—from studio glazes to commercial underglaze, and recipe development to Jungle Gems Crystal Glazes.
Upon finishing school, Allwine took a full-time production assistant position at Jono Pandolfi’s Union City, New Jersey, production ceramics studio. Living in Brooklyn, she would “reverse commute” against traffic the hour-and-a-half to and from work each day. There, she learned the art of using plaster molds to reproduce forms on a wheel—jiggering and jollying. Jollying roughly 60 objects per day, contributing to customer orders sometimes as large as 10,000 pieces, Allwine refined her material and production skills, and learned to spot and correct minute problems amid fields of nearly identical pottery forms.
Shortly after leaving her position at Jono Pandolfi’s studio, Allwine landed a position at BKLYN CLAY, bringing along her accumulated skills and knowledge of both studio ceramics and production methods. As she joined the team, BKLYN CLAY Founder, Director, and CEO Jennifer Waverek, and Studio/ Creative Director Gustav Hamilton were ideating a small production line for the studio to design, manufacture, and sell. With her production experience, Allwine became integral to the project, earning the title of Production and Creative Director. Allwine and Hamilton worked to develop the cleverly streamlined BKLYN CLAY Made product line. From relentless material testing and fine-tuning glaze surfaces, to product development, mold making, and jollying, Allwine’s experience in the world of production (from family business to Jono Pandolfi’s ceramic tableware) has shaped her integral role in the BKLYN CLAY Made line’s success. Beyond designing and producing the actual tableware, Allwine and Hamilton also collaborate to market the line via videos—“It usually starts with a funny idea, then the green screen comes out and we go crazy.” The videos showcase their complementary senses of humor, and present the line as well-made products that don’t take themselves too seriously.
Engaging on a Personal Level
While Allwine is skilled and experienced in large-scale handmade ceramic production, her own artistic work is far from mass produced. But, it certainly engages ideas and objects of mass production. Often handbuilt, her forms reference historical vessel forms and familiar objects, but many of those referent forms are distorted: flattened, silhouetted, and extruded. Allwine plays with surface, applying her painterly sensibilities of composition to the possibilities and challenges presented by three-dimensional form. Detailed scenes depict both personally and culturally nostalgic items that timestamp the compositions, from her childhood VHS archive to peach rings.
Allwine loves people’s stuff. From her mother’s cabinet full of cartoon-character-emblazoned jam-jar glasses, to finding weird or funny or memory-triggering items in strange new context at a thrift store among other donated goods, these mundane mass-produced items begin identity-less, and accumulate both personal and cultural meaning. She describes estate sales as an opportunity to see an especially complete personal collection, a “whole picture of who they are through their stuff.” An estate sale, or any collection of things, becomes a still life, evidence of a collector’s decisions, preferences, and experiences. Collection builds context.
Allwine recounts, “I think at a certain point I learned that pop culture and movies and other media are just a way to communicate with people.” But she also recognizes that communication via culturally familiar objects and imagery isn’t new—she described Magdalena Frimkess as “an icon” and a heroic influence on her work. Frimkess similarly employs familiar characters and objects, from Mickey Mouse to Mayan and Aztec manuscript imagery, building connections among viewers who have shared experience with culturally familiar objects.
Of course the objects and imagery that speak to Allwine reference her own time and experience, but the way she curates and composes ceramic form and surface also exposes her perspective. Cross-section-esque flat vessel forms bring to mind the smooth case of a VHS tape, or a colorful sugary cereal’s box. A VHS cover must represent an entire movie in a single image, just as a cereal box tries to sell you a cereal before you ever taste it. Similarly, the intricate and vivid, yet largely physically flat surfaces of her works use familiar imagery, symbolism, and cultural context to build meaning and draw viewers in.
Her work employs the stuff that surrounds us and our experiences and memories to communicate via her ceramic work. Compositions of objects, or still lifes, describe a person or experience as residual evidence. Stuff also connects us, whether via shared experience with a certain cultural object or particular memories linked to ubiquitous objects of our consumerist world.
Individual items in Allwine’s compositions reference specific memories of her own—home decor of homes long gone, store-bought Valentine cards with popular movie characters dropped into Valentine contexts, the character glassware that no longer fills her mom’s kitchen cabinet. But, these items also might spark a viewer’s forgotten memory, be it something they cherished as a child, something they remember seeing in someone else’s home, or even something often seen discarded on the ground, but nonetheless familiar.
Flies, chewing gum, and other nostalgic fantasy disruptors recur in Allwine’s compositions: “It’s the reality, and sometimes it’s kind of gross,” she says. Flies reference the common still-life trope alluding to impermanence, decay, and mortality. Allwine also has a personal affliction to flies: a dead hamster in the shared wall of a previous apartment once attracted hundreds of flesh flies, which showed up to feast on the corpse until it was gone, but also invaded her living space through every crack they could find. Real living flies give her anxiety to this day, but the singular frozen, painted fly offers a place for them to stay and a purpose. Allwine doesn’t necessarily love flies or gum, but these ubiquitous objects are symbols and allow her compositions to communicate via recognition, context, and disruption.
A Dream Materialized
Having not only come of age but also having emerged as a professional artist in New York, Sarah Allwine’s work is absolutely a product of her context: place, time, experience, and the objects surrounding her. Allwine described herself as a “city potter,” a fitting term. In addition to aesthetic concerns, her artistic decisions take into account limited space in city studios and homes, available firing atmospheres (electric oxidation), and necessary transport of work throughout the ceramic process via bike, train, and on foot. Flat, backpack-size forms work conceptually for her, but also satisfy practical concerns of working between her Brooklyn home studio and at BKLYN CLAY’s Tribeca location, where she also teaches and manages production. Confidence that her New York dream would materialize has served Allwine well so far: “It’s been twelve years and I haven’t left. You figure it out. It’s not Mary-Kate and Ashley, but it’s great. I love it.”
the author Andrew Castañeda is a ceramic artist and photographer currently based in Red Lodge, Montana. To learn more, visit andrewcastaneda.com.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Sarah Allwine grew up running around The Factory—the six-car garage turned family-business-production hub beside her family home. Before Allwine can remember, her family moved from Thousand Oaks, California, where she was born, to Easton, Connecticut, where her parents launched a business making coconut-fiber car-floor mats. The Factory became a place of both work and play for Allwine, her twin, and their three older siblings: they could either help (earning 25 cents for every reloaded bobbin till they got bored) or entertain themselves, inventing games in the woods, watching movies, and dipping into bulging Ziploc bags of markers and colored pencils, drawing everything from imagined fairy worlds to traced VHS covers that became defacto coloring pages.
Memories and Dedication
Growing up, Allwine heard stories over and over recounting her older siblings’ memories of California. This oral storytelling, along with the finite family archive of VHS tapes, music, and other recorded media, became a way for Allwine to connect with her siblings (the oldest being ten years older than her) and the memories they had not shared in real time.
Allwine’s family moved roughly every ten years—ten years in California, ten years in Connecticut, then onto North Carolina, where she lived for almost a decade before beginning undergraduate studies in painting at New York University (NYU). She knew she wanted to pursue art, already having taught herself to oil paint (and in the process, learning how to properly ventilate her makeshift studio space by necessity), practicing with the same dedication she’d learned competing in cross country and track.
Allwine always had a romantic confidence that she’d end up in New York City. She remembers, “It goes back to Mary- Kate and Ashley Olsen being in New York. We used to visit when I was younger, but I always just knew—I’m going to New York and then I can figure something out.” Just as she only had a second-hand memory of California via her family’s stories, she understood New York and its potential through the media fantasies of sitcoms and magazines.
Refining and Developing
Allwine fell into ceramics, describing her undergrad ceramics studio as a place where everyone was having fun, while the painters were serious and competitive. Kathy Butterly, one of Allwine’s first ceramics professors, empowered students to experiment with everything available to them—from studio glazes to commercial underglaze, and recipe development to Jungle Gems Crystal Glazes.
Upon finishing school, Allwine took a full-time production assistant position at Jono Pandolfi’s Union City, New Jersey, production ceramics studio. Living in Brooklyn, she would “reverse commute” against traffic the hour-and-a-half to and from work each day. There, she learned the art of using plaster molds to reproduce forms on a wheel—jiggering and jollying. Jollying roughly 60 objects per day, contributing to customer orders sometimes as large as 10,000 pieces, Allwine refined her material and production skills, and learned to spot and correct minute problems amid fields of nearly identical pottery forms.
Shortly after leaving her position at Jono Pandolfi’s studio, Allwine landed a position at BKLYN CLAY, bringing along her accumulated skills and knowledge of both studio ceramics and production methods. As she joined the team, BKLYN CLAY Founder, Director, and CEO Jennifer Waverek, and Studio/ Creative Director Gustav Hamilton were ideating a small production line for the studio to design, manufacture, and sell. With her production experience, Allwine became integral to the project, earning the title of Production and Creative Director. Allwine and Hamilton worked to develop the cleverly streamlined BKLYN CLAY Made product line. From relentless material testing and fine-tuning glaze surfaces, to product development, mold making, and jollying, Allwine’s experience in the world of production (from family business to Jono Pandolfi’s ceramic tableware) has shaped her integral role in the BKLYN CLAY Made line’s success. Beyond designing and producing the actual tableware, Allwine and Hamilton also collaborate to market the line via videos—“It usually starts with a funny idea, then the green screen comes out and we go crazy.” The videos showcase their complementary senses of humor, and present the line as well-made products that don’t take themselves too seriously.
Engaging on a Personal Level
While Allwine is skilled and experienced in large-scale handmade ceramic production, her own artistic work is far from mass produced. But, it certainly engages ideas and objects of mass production. Often handbuilt, her forms reference historical vessel forms and familiar objects, but many of those referent forms are distorted: flattened, silhouetted, and extruded. Allwine plays with surface, applying her painterly sensibilities of composition to the possibilities and challenges presented by three-dimensional form. Detailed scenes depict both personally and culturally nostalgic items that timestamp the compositions, from her childhood VHS archive to peach rings.
Allwine loves people’s stuff. From her mother’s cabinet full of cartoon-character-emblazoned jam-jar glasses, to finding weird or funny or memory-triggering items in strange new context at a thrift store among other donated goods, these mundane mass-produced items begin identity-less, and accumulate both personal and cultural meaning. She describes estate sales as an opportunity to see an especially complete personal collection, a “whole picture of who they are through their stuff.” An estate sale, or any collection of things, becomes a still life, evidence of a collector’s decisions, preferences, and experiences. Collection builds context.
Allwine recounts, “I think at a certain point I learned that pop culture and movies and other media are just a way to communicate with people.” But she also recognizes that communication via culturally familiar objects and imagery isn’t new—she described Magdalena Frimkess as “an icon” and a heroic influence on her work. Frimkess similarly employs familiar characters and objects, from Mickey Mouse to Mayan and Aztec manuscript imagery, building connections among viewers who have shared experience with culturally familiar objects.
Of course the objects and imagery that speak to Allwine reference her own time and experience, but the way she curates and composes ceramic form and surface also exposes her perspective. Cross-section-esque flat vessel forms bring to mind the smooth case of a VHS tape, or a colorful sugary cereal’s box. A VHS cover must represent an entire movie in a single image, just as a cereal box tries to sell you a cereal before you ever taste it. Similarly, the intricate and vivid, yet largely physically flat surfaces of her works use familiar imagery, symbolism, and cultural context to build meaning and draw viewers in.
Her work employs the stuff that surrounds us and our experiences and memories to communicate via her ceramic work. Compositions of objects, or still lifes, describe a person or experience as residual evidence. Stuff also connects us, whether via shared experience with a certain cultural object or particular memories linked to ubiquitous objects of our consumerist world.
Individual items in Allwine’s compositions reference specific memories of her own—home decor of homes long gone, store-bought Valentine cards with popular movie characters dropped into Valentine contexts, the character glassware that no longer fills her mom’s kitchen cabinet. But, these items also might spark a viewer’s forgotten memory, be it something they cherished as a child, something they remember seeing in someone else’s home, or even something often seen discarded on the ground, but nonetheless familiar.
Flies, chewing gum, and other nostalgic fantasy disruptors recur in Allwine’s compositions: “It’s the reality, and sometimes it’s kind of gross,” she says. Flies reference the common still-life trope alluding to impermanence, decay, and mortality. Allwine also has a personal affliction to flies: a dead hamster in the shared wall of a previous apartment once attracted hundreds of flesh flies, which showed up to feast on the corpse until it was gone, but also invaded her living space through every crack they could find. Real living flies give her anxiety to this day, but the singular frozen, painted fly offers a place for them to stay and a purpose. Allwine doesn’t necessarily love flies or gum, but these ubiquitous objects are symbols and allow her compositions to communicate via recognition, context, and disruption.
A Dream Materialized
Having not only come of age but also having emerged as a professional artist in New York, Sarah Allwine’s work is absolutely a product of her context: place, time, experience, and the objects surrounding her. Allwine described herself as a “city potter,” a fitting term. In addition to aesthetic concerns, her artistic decisions take into account limited space in city studios and homes, available firing atmospheres (electric oxidation), and necessary transport of work throughout the ceramic process via bike, train, and on foot. Flat, backpack-size forms work conceptually for her, but also satisfy practical concerns of working between her Brooklyn home studio and at BKLYN CLAY’s Tribeca location, where she also teaches and manages production. Confidence that her New York dream would materialize has served Allwine well so far: “It’s been twelve years and I haven’t left. You figure it out. It’s not Mary-Kate and Ashley, but it’s great. I love it.”
the author Andrew Castañeda is a ceramic artist and photographer currently based in Red Lodge, Montana. To learn more, visit andrewcastaneda.com.
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