Sári Ember works in stone, clay, and fabric to create sculptural installations that evoke human culture across time and place. The Budapest-based artist brings her personal experiences to archetypal forms, which equally allow the viewer to see their own inner worlds and associations in the work. In this Phone Tag interview, we discuss collaborating during the pandemic, how time in Brazil shaped her as an artist, and her intuitive working process.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

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Linnea West:  What are you working on now?

Sári Ember:  Strangely, I haven’t been working for several months now. I decided during the pandemic that, as everything is postponed, I would just make what I was longing for. I took a sabbatical. It was very good. But now it’s nice to have some deadlines, and I’m excited to get back to work. I will have a dual show in October with Eszter Kállay.

She’s mainly a poet, and also an artist. I invited her to do this show. She would present her poems and I would show objects. It’s nice that this has been a process that we started in February. During the quarantine, we exchanged emails. I like that we had this long preparation period and dialogue.

I was due to have a solo show in the gallery which represents me—Ani Molnár Gallery. I had this idea: I wanted to do something about my grandmothers. My last grandmother died a year ago so now, therefore, all this generation is dead. I’ve been dealing with the death of my grandmothers a lot. I was very close to both of them, and I’ve been very close to their problems somehow too.

I was thinking about how they influenced me, the life they lived, and through their point of view how they can understand my life and my problems. I’m often nostalgic or admiring some things from their lives. I feel a lot of love and anger, pride and shame, in my connection to them, which is connected to the female roles they had to play, and the roles I do not want to play.

I very much felt connected to Eszter’s poems. They are in first person; they are both very everyday and celebrational at the same time. I felt my grandmother’s presence and related questions. The presence of her own body. Not only her mind, but also her body, how it is present on the street. What does it mean, a female body? I’m making big ceramic vessels and vases, black and grey with some drawings on them. There will be some androgynous and female figures in different situations painted or drawn on these vessels. It’s still in progress.

LW:  Do you think the work is different because you have been collaborating with Eszter over such a long period of time?

SE:  I don’t know if it’s different. I didn’t have different ideas about the exhibition, but I’m more confident about it. I understand it more. I am more involved in her poems, and she’s more involved in my works or my way of thinking, and this led to a very subtle selection of works, where I think the texts and objects will communicate in a way that it can create a new understanding for both.

LW:  I wonder if that’s a silver lining of the pandemic, that when you take more time you can have deeper relationships. I often feel like I’m having conversations with people now that are very real, very intimate.

SE:  It’s strange that when we do things fast and more superficial way, they still often happen. Exhibitions happen, and events happen. It feels so good to do it with more attention and more time.

LW:  Who has influenced your artistic practice? That doesn’t necessarily have to be an artist, just anyone who influences how you approach your work.

SE:  Actually, I think what mostly influenced my works are people close to me doing artistic work or other creative processes, such as architecture.

I was very influenced by my best friend, and a very good friend, who are architects; Zsófia Kronevetter also makes ceramics. She’s a wonderful, creative person. I learned making ceramics from her. It really opened new fields for me. I was very influenced by my ex‑boyfriend, Bruno [Baptistelli], who was the first artist that I knew so closely. Understanding his process was very important for me. We made this project CHANGE-CHANGE, a nomadic artist run space. We organized five shows, and the artists and curators were all staying in our house for a week and preparing the exhibition. It was a very intense and inspiring experience for me. It was like going to a residency, but people came to our home. Among them was Daniel Lie, a Brazilian artist, and they inspired me a lot. They are a Brazilian artist. We had an outdoor exhibition space, and one afternoon while preparing, they took a little pillow and said “I’m going to sleep there.” They slept there to see what their dreams are, how they wake up, what are their intuitions. That’s wonderful.

Now I am very influenced by my boyfriend. He has a very different approach to art. It’s very critical and deals with ethical questions. I’m very fond of his way of thinking, which is very different than my process.

When I was in Brazil from 2013 to 2015, I was overwhelmed by the Brazilian art scene. I saw a lot of exhibitions, and I was in touch with lots of artists. The art scene is so open… Of course, it has its limits, but it’s very open with the forms and how you express things. It’s very much about the thought and the intuition. For me, that was very much part of being in Brazil, to see how these people work.

LW:  I’m curious because you mentioned one influence is your boyfriend, and that he has a critical perspective in how he approaches his work. I wouldn’t necessarily use that word to describe your practice, but I do think you’re thinking of social roles to some degree, too. For example, when you think about your grandmothers, you’re also thinking about the role of women in society, but maybe it’s more from a perspective of how it feels to live it.

SE:  Yeah, it’s true. My starting point is intuitive. I don’t read for my topics. I work based on what I experience. Whereas he researches. He reads about the historical context, studies, articles.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I talk about these topics in a very delicate and kind of poetic way. For me, it wouldn’t be my language to speak directly, because I like to approach more people with my work. Even with my opinions, I would like to leave more layers or ways of interpretation.

The forms or materials I use are very simple. Not simple, but I carve faces and figures in stone or ceramic vessels; these are kind of objects that we know well from ancient history. We make our own interpretation of these objects based on our point of views and connections to them. I really like that we don’t really know what they are. I like to provide this experience of my work, that you don’t really know what it is.

LW:  Right. There’s an openness to that.

SE:  Yeah. I like to keep that openness.

LW:  When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

SE:  I think that was also in Brazil. I studied photography, and for a few years I was a photographer. I wanted to go to Brazil, and I was looking for residencies like an art residency, a photography residency. I found a close deadline, and I applied, and I got it. In Casa Tomada, we were eight international and Brazilian artists sharing a small studio space, and having some talks and visits together. It was the first time I was considered simply as an artist and not a photo-artist. It was very interesting for me. Also, it was the first time I had a studio, so I had a table outside of my home where I can do whatever. Then I started to call myself an artist. I wasn’t very confident. In the Hungarian language, if you say, “I’m an artist,” it almost sounds like, “I’m an asshole.”

[laughter]

It sounds pretentious. At that time, all my artist friends, I asked them: “When they ask you, what do you do, what do you say?” Then they said, “I say my practice is painting.” Or, “I am doing a graphic work,” or, “I’m making sculptures.” [laughs] No one really said, “I’m an artist,” which has many layers. It’s about confidence. It’s also about the prejudice you get. “OK, but what do you do?”—I mean, you can’t make a living off it. It’s your hobby, practically, or your passion.

LW:  You mentioned having a studio for the first time, and now of course, you’re making objects. I’m curious… is your practice largely studio-based? What’s an ideal day in the studio?

SE:  My practice is not very studio‑based. I had a studio, and then for a year now I haven’t had a studio. I was away for residencies too, so I decided to just have a storage for some time. But now I will have again a small space. Otherwise I work at home. I make the ceramics at home. The stone pieces, I plan on my computer, and then I go to the stone carver and I choose the stones. I don’t actually make them, but there are smaller pieces which I bring home. Then I can live with them a little to see what to do with them. I would like my work to be more studio‑based but it’s mostly my sketchbook and computer and kitchen table.

LW:  Are you able to do all the ceramics at home?

SE:  It’s quite good to do at home because with ceramics time is very important. I let something dry for two hours, or five hours, or half a day, or one day. Then I do another step in the process, which might be 10 minutes, but I have to do it at the right dryness. It’s good to do it at home. Then I bring it to fire somewhere else.

LW:  That makes sense. My final question is my favorite because people have a lot of interesting answers. Do you think as an artist, it’s more important to be in a big city—a place maybe like Budapest, or New York, or whatever—where it’s busy and there’s a cultural scene and there are galleries, or to be in a smaller place where you can focus on just making?

SE:  The ideal would be to live in the countryside. To have space and time and calmness, no distraction from work. Then spend two months in New York, or London, or whatever. It’s interesting because Budapest is somewhere between the two. It’s a small city where many things are happening but not the big important things.

It’s calm, but then it’s not super calm. It’s somewhere in the middle. Actually, I quite like it. Recently I’m not longing for too much inspiration, to see other artworks or concerts. Mostly, the input is tiring to me, so I’m very selective now.

LW:  There are moments where I really miss seeing art. But I don’t know if I need it as much as I thought I did before the pandemic started.

SE:  True! I think at some point in the next months I will miss seeing art and travelling a lot.

I remembered one more thing for the studio practice, that there is one thing I do in the studio that I can’t do at home. Since Brazil, I have a practice of making collages, even if I only do thirty a year. It’s a very nice, loose way to think about new works and projects. It’s a very different material. It’s not stone; it’s not ceramics; it’s two‑dimensional. It’s the abstract, third version of my work and it’s very free to make them. That, I miss a lot. That’s why I would like to have a studio again.

LW:  That’s great. Thank you for participating in this interview.

SE:  Thanks.