A Crooked Path

"I've discovered that to live my life deliberately I must follow my own genius, which can be a very crooked path." Henry David Thoreau's words provide the starting point for A Crooked Path, Sarah Odedina's new exhibition with ARTI — an apt title for an artist whose work has always followed its own, delightfully idiosyncratic route. One of the most fascinating things about Sarah's ceramics is the way they cross time and place — from Ancient Greece and Rome to twentieth-century literature. Her ceramic and textile pieces carry fragments of poetry, literature and everyday sayings, their handmade surfaces celebrating the irregularities that make each piece unique. For A Crooked Path, Sarah takes that love of storytelling beyond clay, for the first time bringing her ceramics together with a collection of textile works created in her studio in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. These intimate, narrative pieces bring words and images together in unexpected ways — sometimes tenderly, sometimes with a wry twist. The textiles also draw on another history close to Sarah's heart: the tradition of women making quilts, using available materials to create objects that provide comfort, preserve stories and communicate ideas. "I try in my work to applaud all the wonderful ways that people mark their lives with meaning," Sarah says. "Everything from gardening to being in love, enjoying a joke and celebrating a life. Inspiration comes from many different places and my hope is to create work that has a story to share." A Crooked Path is both an exhibition and a reflection of the journey behind it — a celebration of following instinct and allowing ideas to wander. As Sarah says, the title "suggests something of the crooked path I have taken and will hopefully continue to take."