The New York Times

By Coco Romack

Entering the sculptor Sally Saul’s studio in Germantown, N.Y., two hours north of New York City, it feels as though you’ve happened upon some strange conference between man and animal. There is very little hanging on the white walls of the work space, which occupies the first of two floors in a building that, covered with green corrugated metal, resembles an upgraded shed. But across the floor and atop tables are lumpy earthen depictions of tree-dwelling creatures beside prominent historical figures like the American novelist Gertrude Stein. The cross-species interactions are mostly benign, as in a vignette where a girl seated on a stump is flanked by two kind-looking roosters. But some have more of an editorializing bite: To address her frustrations with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s abortion rulings, Saul cast him as being eternally tormented by three pudgy spiders. “Some pieces are sweeter, and then I think, ‘I want to make something that’s fiercer,’” she says. “I go back and forth.”

Saul picks up a round object swaddled in Bubble Wrap. Peering out from the protective plastic covering is her terra-cotta sculpture “Effigy With Feathers” (1999), which depicts a crying child with pointy yellow hair adorned with red and blue plumes whose arms are outstretched as if pleading to be held. The figure wears a red apron dress that previously belonged to the artist’s daughter and was resewn to fit its new owner. “I tend to make things that relate to my life, to my family and to what I know,” says Saul. Another statue nearby is of her husband, the painter Peter Saul, wearing a slate pajama set fastened with four peach-toned buttons. Compared to a previous version of Peter in “Back and Forth” (2019), which was around two feet tall, this rendering is smaller, standing below knee height with bulging, lopsided eyes and disheveled white hair. “I didn’t want to make it in two parts, so I shrank him down,” she explains. “He’s older now, too, than in the first one.”

Saul fires her creations in one of two kilns at the edge of the room. A wooden desk below a window is covered with papers and objects from which she might occasionally pull references. There are two bird nests that she retrieved from a pasture outside her and Peter’s 1860s Victorian home, just a few feet from her studio building, and a catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2021 exhibition of contemporary ceramics, “Shapes From Out of Nowhere.”

Examining the book, she flips past a photograph of a rough-hewn vessel that was made by her friend the sculptor Robert Arneson, one of the Funk artists — a loose affiliation of figurative artists that thrived in the Bay Area in the 1970s — whom Saul credits with introducing her to the clay. She received a master’s degree in American Literature from San Francisco State University in 1973, and it wasn’t until the early ’80s that she enrolled in ceramics classes at the University of Texas in Austin, where Peter had been hired as a professor. Clay was largely considered an inferior material then, and Saul worked for decades as a hobbyist, developing her off-kilter approach to ceramic arts without many lofty ambitions. That critical perspective has shifted in recent years and so, too, has the industry’s attention toward Saul’s playfully crude facture. Since her inclusion in a group presentation at Canada Gallery in 2014, her first in New York, Saul has become the subject of an increasing number of shows. At 77, she will have her third solo exhibition in New York, at the gallery Venus Over Manhattan, which opens this week. Sitting at a small wooden table in her studio, just before lunchtime on her birthday in April, she answers T’s Artist’s Questionnaire.

What is your day like? How much do you sleep, and what’s your work schedule?

Well, that depends. [Peter and I] tend to stay up late. We didn’t used to be that way, but we’ve developed this routine of spending a part of the morning doing chores, which is frustrating. For example, we have to change our health care plan, and that just involves a morass that you never knew existed, really, until you try to comprehend what it’s all about. It just destroys your day dealing with these kinds of things. So that’s what happens with part of the morning sometimes. Then we read the paper for about 45 minutes. We start our day after that, probably around lunchtime, and work late.
 

What time do you usually stop working?

Around 7:30 or 8:00, when we fix dinner. Then we read or watch TV for a little bit and go to bed. We never seem to get into bed before 11:00, though. I don’t know why that happens.
 

Who does most of the cooking, you or Peter?

Oh, Peter doesn’t cook much. He does breakfast, so that’s OK. It’s usually the same: the flakes we like, some fresh fruit, juice, coffee, toast and jam. If we want a poached egg, I make it.

How many hours of creative work do you think you do in a day?

About six or seven hours, depending on whether I have to go out and do grocery shopping or something like that. There are times when I’ve been by myself here and I’ll work until midnight. I like it. It’s peaceful. On Saturday nights, they have very good music on the local station, so it’s nice to have the music on and just work.

Is that what you’re typically listening to when you’re making art?

I usually have a classical station on, WMHT, but I get tired of it. My Bose disc player isn’t working, so that’s a disappointment because I like to play CDs. I have some Bob Dylan, some Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Leonard Cohen, Philip Glass. Just a range of things, really.
 

What’s the first piece of art you ever made?

I always liked working with my hands in mud. I grew up outside of Ithaca [N.Y.] in the Finger Lakes and in the countryside. A friend and I would wander around in the woods, wherever we wanted — it’s not like today where everybody is concerned about watching their children. We were digging around and found some clay. We sat and made these dishes or ashtrays, and then we would paint them. I couldn’t fire them, so ultimately they would break, of course, but I remember it being very satisfying somehow. I guess that was the beginning. I can’t remember ever having any painting classes when I was younger, so I struggled with that when I was older. It seemed that working with my hands in the clay came more naturally. I felt it was innate.

What’s the worst studio you ever had?

The worst one was probably at Hunter College. It was in the cellar. It was kind of dank, and they would put poison out for the mice every once in a while, or for the rats maybe. On the other hand, there were good instructors and guest artists would come in, so that was valuable. There were glazes you could use, and you could mix up your own clay. I had learned to mix up my clay in Austin when I was taking classes there. I was having trouble with cracking, so the instructor gave me a recipe that had a lot of grog in it. I mixed it all up and it worked great.

What was the first work you ever sold, and for how much?

I didn’t sell anything during the Austin years. Maybe there was something that I’ve forgotten. I really began to sell once I had a piece in a group show at Canada Gallery in 2014. That sold, my Rachel Carson piece [ “Rachel Carson and Eagles” (2013)]. You would see the busts of important men all the time, and I decided that [the ecologist] Rachel Carson needed to have one, too. I did her with little eaglets around her. I don’t remember the price, except I’m sure it seemed to me like a large amount, maybe in the $4,000 range. And then I started showing at Rachel Uffner’s gallery and she increased the prices. I sold quite a few pieces there.

When you start a new piece, where do you begin? What’s the first step?

I’ll draw a little picture to get some idea of what I want it to look like. If it’s a figure, I start with a base and work my way up, then I add to it as I go along. Part of the evolution of it is not me but the piece itself adjusting to what it wants to be.
 

How do you know when you’re done?

I don’t. I mean, I could go on for quite a while. When a sculpture is done, it’s just because I have to stop working on it and go to something else. [Saul gestures toward a work in progress, a sculpture that depicts a woman wearing an orange dress with oversize bare feet affixed to the base.] This is done. I have to fire it one more time. You make a piece, and then you look at it for a while and think, “Oh, I could have done such and such.” So you make another one that is similar in some ways, and then another one. It’s always a learning process.

How many assistants do you have?

I don’t have any. Peter doesn’t, either. He does have someone who stretches his canvas and dresses it, but we don’t really have a need for full-time assistance. The gallery will take care of packing things up and shipping them, and that’s all the help I need. I don’t know what I would do with an assistant.