Sara Bowen

How I got here:

I grew up in South Alabama, digging clay out of sandy pockets in the banks of the Alabama River. Oddly enough, I threw my first pot during a student ambassador trip to China when I was 15, followed by high school pottery classes at the Alabama School of Math & Science in Mobile, AL.

I worked on the potters wheel when I could throughout high school and college: as an impromptu student with studio potter Sam Williams from my hometown of Monroeville, and as an intern (whose payment came in classes from potter Scott Bennett and oil painter Dori Decamillis) with Red Dot Gallery in Birmingham, AL, where I attended Birmingham-Southern College.

As I approached the completion of my Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History in 2012, I took a semester of wheel-throwing at UAB with Jim Alexander. After that, I decided I wanted to make pots for a living. I received a potter's wheel as a graduation present, found a very old used kiln on CraigsList, and took over my mom's garage/my dad's old workshop for a year and a half after college. In that time, I started really practicing and figuring out how to form the clay with intention, and began building an understanding of glazes and my electric kiln.

I moved to Huntsville in 2014 and began sharing a studio at Lowe Mill and selling my pots. In the fall of 2015, I quit my day job and became a full-time potter and pottery teacher.

  Since then, I've been working to make pots that hold a little bit of the magic I found growing up in the woods and along the riverbanks of South Alabama.

Find my CV here.