Sarah Vaughn

Sarah Vaughn grew up in Southern Illinois, discovering glass while pursuing a BFA at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She has forged several award-winning collaborative practices with fellow artists and friends. In the fall of 2022, Sarah moved to Penland School of Crafts to be an Artist in Resident. She enjoys life in the mountains, where she spends time with her dog while pursuing new veins of her work and fixing broken rocks.

In March 2020, I found myself without a studio, a community, and, soon, income. Like many, I felt lost but put on a face of composure. Time melted away. A week turned into two, then three, then nothing more than an undefined end on the horizon. I needed a way to mark the days and have a creative outlet for my restless hands. I turned to a box of wool and two tiny felting needles. In my usual practice, I am a caster. The lost wax process is a cathartic exercise, destroying the last part of the process to move on to the next step. I create glass stones that beg to be touched and caressed; they are memories we treasure and moments we mark.

I found the catharsis I long for in the act of dry needle felting the wool buried deep in a closet. I gave myself an unachievable task of condensing the tufts of wool into small hard stones. No matter how long I quietly stabbed the ever-shrinking collection of fibers, the form would still give to the pressure of my squeeze; the surface refused to become smooth. Each day, when I decided I was done, I placed the wool pebble on a shelf next to the previous day’s; a growing line of passing time, the accomplishment of something arbitrary that could never be what I wanted.

“Consideration of Time” results from 210 days of waiting for the world to return to normal. Like most things that were at one point daily ritual, there is a moment when it stops. When I stopped making the stones, the strange new world stopped being strange and new. It was just the world.