Sarah Knight (they/them) is an artist currently living and working in Saint Louis, Missouri. They grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and received a BFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. They graduated with an MFA from Washington University in Saint Louis. Their current work focuses on the reorientation of fragmentary queer narratives. How can we reappropriate dominant narratives of queer history while highlighting the absences of certain voices? How can we bring out these gaps in knowledge to better understand our contemporary queer identities? How can non-histories, non-narratives, and uncomfortable disjointed non-places serve us in communicating our understanding of the world? While a “research based artist,” their practice hinges on the material properties of melting stone, sublimation, offgassing, and shattering. Geology, topography, cartography, minerology, and mythology all play a central role in Knight’s exploration of material.

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Artist Statement

My materially-focused practice seeks to show that all matter is queer in a state of transformation and flux. As a transgender artist my experience and practice embody the continual metamorphosis the queer community relies on for survival. I create an ever-growing series of works that use play and transmutation in my material. I use clay, paper, ephemeral materials, rock, and translucent ceramics to create interactive installations, 2D work, and sculpture. Using an expanding material palette, I can show that this queer transmutation is found in how the natural world must adapt to climate change, human intervention, political attack, and natural disaster. I call this process queer alchemy.

In the kiln, I fuse my sculptures with studio scrap, melted rocks, glass, sand, steel, donated broken pottery, and more. By crushing up these materials into clay bodies, glazes, and raw ingredients, I can infuse my works with my immediate community and environment. My translucent porcelain works resemble bioluminescence or the stained glass of reliquary spaces. These works use material, light, and queer alchemy to allow us to engage with sensory representations of color, texture, and time and share a personal experience with the ways the LGBTQIA+ community persists, radiant, in both ephemeral and physical spaces.

My work connects craft history, queer fragmentation, and ecological fragility using the intangibility of light, fluidity of water, and tactility of ceramics. My goal is to position queer and transgender lives as protean, existing as everything, nothing, frustratingly resistant to systems of order, oppression, and regulation.