Sarah Hughes is a ceramic sculptor whose work reflects the uncertainty and anxiety of modern life. She began making small sculptural pieces seven years ago at her local ceramic studio, Gasworks, and has since progressed to making larger sculptures and vessels. Her work has been exhibited at multiple group shows in artist-run galleries, such as Deep Space in Jersey City, Public Swim Gallery in New York City, Well Well Projects in Portland, OR, and Shoebox Projects in Los Angeles.  

Sarah’s pieces address universal experiences of loneliness, isolation, and nostalgia. The melancholic interior life that is experienced in adolescence is trans-muted into ostentatious and obsessively detailed vessels, often with uncannily cute and colorful exteriors. She reinterprets stereotypical pop culture motifs through her own lens– familiar icons are reframed to highlight throughlines of ritualism, memory, and alienation. Colors, textures, and details in her pieces clash and meld to create an overwhelmingly maximalist and superficially bright experience. In this way, Sarah pushes and pulls at the boundaries of these symbols as they are to be understood in the broader cultural context. The comfort of the observer is continually tested, as the aesthetic and conceptual contradictions that she incorporates into her visual vocabulary, spiral together within their own vacuum.

Sarah’s funeral urn series explores the concepts of “past selves”, abandonment, and domesticity using Victorian-inspired symbolism connected to death and mourning. The sculptures possess a queasy humor, replete with eerie, esoteric details that confront the viewer with a sense of their own fragility. She considers personal memories and experiences in her work, prompting viewers to contemplate what they themselves have lost and forgotten, as well as the things that they don’t want to hold on to.