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

Is all matter intrinsically queer in a state of transformation? By blurring boundaries between geology, ecology, and human systems, I hope to reveal the hidden power of the unidentifiable. As a transgender artist my experience and practice embody the continual survival through metamorphosis the queer community undergoes. From my experimental ceramic processes, I build queer ecologies that use hybridization and flux as camouflage and remembrance.

I recreate the earth’s entropic processes in a ceramic kiln, speeding up geological time. I melt rocks in steel crucibles with ceramic, studio scrap, gravel, glass, and donated broken pottery. By crushing up these materials into clay bodies, glazes, and raw ingredients, I can honor the origin stories and inevitable destruction of matter. This process of queer alchemy is meant to highlight the divide between the natural and artificial. My finished sculptures are often installed in immersive spaces that mimic natural systems and bring queerness closer to the environments that inspire my work. Ultimately, my work expresses how queerness exists in spaces of entropy.