Sarah Hartnett ‘1 + 1 = 3’

The clay marks in this show are remnants of a ritual. Sarah chose to use clay as the unfired unformed mirror to engage in herself the spirit of the works before they manifested as solidified forms. Using trance and dance to make a lucid connection with archetypes usually tamed by daily life, this meditative process helped inspire walks and synchronistic discoveries around Derbyshire, particularly with the carvings found in St Mary's church. 

The precise origins and symbology of the carvings are disputable and open to interpretation. As culture shifts throughout time, the stories we tell ourselves shape the range of possible experiences we can make with the divine. Who are the angels? Whose messengers are they? Who gate-keeps the range of perception? How does culture limit or expand the potential of divine experience? 

The clay daemons are forlorn and bare abrasions from the transformative fires of the kiln. They are in waiting, but also active vessels of gestation, about to bring offspring into the world without the promise of the kingdom within. On the terracotta mine chimneys, which reference the old industry of Derbyshires landscape, grow vine-like plants and a little nature spirit. The carved faces reference Sheela na gig’s that once adorned British churches before suffering defacement. Sarah’s reanimation of these divine feminine archetypes mark the works with a defiance of spirit, a sympathetic reverence for the enduring permeance of the disowned and repressed. The angels sing a prophecy of the inevitability of things crumbling away and being reclaimed again by nature and change. The glazes reference bile, bacteria, fungi, and all things that feed off bodily fluids in process of decomposing and leaching the gross body back down into the Earth. The little cheeky masks that hang overhead are contemporary motifs of the heretical reptilian conspiracies flooding the internet today. They speak to a specific carving within St Mary's church that share a similar tension of tolerance and deviance at play during the 7th century. Imbued with the archetypal magic of spiritual anarchism, a constant of the human condition haunting the collective.

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