Currently on View: Raven Armstead – Heavy is the Hand
November 22, 2023 @ 11:00 am - February 3, 2024 @ 7:00 pm
Third Floor East Gallery
This exhibition round includes works provided by Sara Bowen which will be on view in the First Floor West Gallery from November 22, 2023 – February 3, 2024. Lowe Mill A&E invites patrons and art lovers to join us for Open Studio Night, a building-wide experience when our over 150 studios will be open to the public. The evening also includes receptions for all seven of our gallery spaces. This series gives the public a chance to meet and interact with visiting artists and discuss their work as it is on display and available for purchase. Come out, enjoy a pleasant evening, and maybe you’ll find that special piece of art that speaks to you! The Open Studio Night reception is Saturday, February 3 from 5-7 pm.
About the exhibit:
For me pottery is a gift of memories. Childhood weekends spent digging up clay from Alabama River sandbars, not making much of anything but loving the squish between my fingers. Memories of painting ceramic and wooden figures in my Gamaw’s duck house, doing Christmas crafts with my Momma, designing mismatched jewelry in high school. Following my Daddy’s footsteps and working for myself, building things. Joy and making and busy hands.
I threw my first pot on the wheel when I was 15. I’d lost my dad to cancer the year before and with him, huge parts of myself –my confidence, tenderness, and volition. It didn’t take long to know that I wanted to keep working with clay. After that first pot, I found any chance I could to work with clay throughout high school and college. When I graduated in 2012, my Gamaw gave me a potters wheel as a gift and I got to work. A year later, I sold my first pot: a berry bowl made with my dad’s rusty old drill bits. Here we are, ten years and lots of clay later, and I’m pinching myself with muddy fingers.
About the artist:
Sara Bowen graduated from Birmingham-Southern College in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History, specializing in Medieval art and religious art pieces. Bowen began working with clay on the potter’s wheel in 2005, during a high school art class and continued through college, with potters like Scott Bennett and with Jim Alexander at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. After learning more about clay and about making a living as an artist, she decided to pursue pottery as a career. Bowen worked in her mother’s garage for nearly two years before moving to Huntsville, AL in 2014 and opening a studio at Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment. She began teaching pottery classes in 2015. In 2019, Sara Bowen closed her studio at Lowe Mill A&E and has been working from a home studio ever since. She has exhibited work in galleries across the state, and her work can be found online at www.sarabowenpottery.com and @sarabowenpottery on Instagram and Facebook.