Sara Swink makes ceramic human and animal figures from a psychological stance. Introspective, ambiguous, sometimes awkward, they often have a humorous edge. Her ideas derive most often from a process methodology, which employs simple and unencumbered techniques like collage and doodling to unleash the unconscious. This leads to sketches and from there to forming the works using a gritty sculpture clay. She finishes the with oxides, underglazes and glazes, fired to cone 5As Sara explained to Art Beat, Episode S1E4“I think there's a lot of power in the shadowy side of things, and I don't shy away from it at all. I happen to be in a less dark place in my life right now, but I’ve been through plenty of dark places and really used art to explore those places. I make human and animal figures with a psychological stance and a dash of humor. My work comes out of my own psyche, and it comes through a process that I use, starting with collage and sometimes involving doodling, sketching, and then making the piece in clay. It's like an unlearning process to get out of the way. There is a thread and there is a narrative. It's like my life narrative is coming forth in the clay. I think my style could be described as almost folk-arty, sort of folk art from the culture of me. There's thought in it, but for me, it's much more how it feels. And if I can't make a decision about how I want it to look, I picture how I'd want it to be if I kept it in my own bedroom. Adding color is when it all comes together. It's when the vision really starts to happen, because so many of these pieces are so much about the color. When the clay is wet, it's beautiful by itself. When it dries, it's less beautiful. When it's bisque-fired, its first firing, it's probably at its homeliest. What we have to do is bring back the color to it to make it beautiful again, which is a very challenging process. It's very easy to go wrong with glazing. I don't like my pieces highly finished. I like to have pieces that have my mark on them, that have hand marks on them that aren't perfect and polished. So I know a piece is finished when it brings the idea across, and I don't need to overwork it from there. I love working with clay because it's malleable, and everything I make has my mark on it, no matter what I do. It comes out in my style. And that's just what happens with whatever we do, really. But clay has a special way of becoming like an extension of myself. I do think that the 6-year-old that lives in me is the one who makes the choices about what we make next, and I go with that.