Sara Radstone has made a quiet progression from standing vessels to sculptures that ride along and hang from other parts of our space; concentrations of places seen and felt, and the memory of things. It is as if materiality is a constant trigger, the clay formed and marked in a muted and very distilled language, these objects the residue of time, and of natural and human interactions revealed in their accretions and patinas, their apparent erosions. Born in 1955, Radstone attended Herefordshire College of Art and Camberwell College of Arts, and has long lived and worked in London's Blackheath. She was a major part of the 1970s sculptural shift in ceramics, her earlier work already exploring the ambiguities and uncertainties of form and surface, pots unusually light and sonorously rich, such was her early ability to take clay into new sensual territory. Unlike some of her contemporaries, she never got trapped by 'style', letting her ideas grow outwards, her spatial drawing and interest in different kinds of volume realised latterly in more open objects (some combined with other materials), more retrieved fragments, perhaps of a forgotten culture. Other shapes are more attenuated, obliquely figurative, but all her pieces are still 'vessels' in the broadest sense, holding, carrying some corpus of knowledge.

David Whiting