TILE MAKING AS ART PRACTICE 2025-26 by Sarah Taylor Silverwood

My practice works across animation, textiles, ceramics, sculpture and print. The themes of my work are playful storytelling; materiality and hand-crafted processes; and responsive and ambitious collaboration. The repeated square tile emerged as a natural extension of my earlier work in comics and animation, where meaning is built through sequences of images. Working with tiles allows me to translate into a physical, modular form, where each unit operates both independently and as part of a larger narrative.

Tiles also hold the capacity to tell stories through their material and use. As a functional art form, they are lived with over time, recording touch, wear, and shifts in their environment. Their permanence within a site allows them to build a relationship with place, embedding narrative in the everyday. I am also interested in the way a clay body itself can engage with a location. Through its connection to local geology and histories of industry, the material carries a sense of place, allowing each work to be rooted in its context.