Sara Ballek

Sara Ballek grew up the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. From early on, she was an artist and an aesthete. Sara earned her BFA in Ceramics from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in 2016. From there she moved to Asheville, North Carolina and began to establish her ceramics career. She works as full time studio potter while also teaching ceramics classes and workshops in her community, online, and other clay studios around the country. Recently, she moved back to the Southern Illinois region, where she works from her home studio and teaches the community ceramics classes at Paducah School of Art and Design.

“The collective details in a space can create lasting impressions that may evoke memories from a specific time or place in someone’s life. The inventiveness of integrating form and surface in my work is often inspired by the visual elements from my recollection of physical environments. Memories of homes, gardens, familiar and foreign places. Places I have been and places I only dream of. Texture, color, and pattern are the main components I hone in on when designing an object. I enjoy wheel-throwing as it allows for consistency and repetition, and later altering the form by pinching to add distinctive qualities to each object. There is an attraction to repetition when creating the forms. Each piece becomes a canvas, as well as a puzzle. The varying surface details on each piece in addition to achieving a sense of color harmony causes me to think of each form as room or an outfit. With the combination of techniques I incorporate in my work through tactile expression, using a wide array of color combinations, and various patterns, each piece made is one-of-a-kind.”