In Conversation: Dr Sally Wetherall
To mark International Women’s Day, Fleur sits down with artist, ceramicist, and newly titled Dr Sally Wetherall for a conversation about creativity, endurance, and the women who shape our paths.
From sustaining a creative practice through life’s many demands to the power of collaboration over competition, their discussion reflects on what it means to devote yourself to a craft and the generosity that exists between women who support one another.
In honour of this year’s International Women's Day theme, Give to Gain, Sally shares the mentors, friendships and acts of encouragement that have shaped her journey and why giving knowledge, space and belief to other women only strengthens the creative community around us.
You have just completed your PhD and stepped into this new chapter as Dr Sally Wetherall. What has that journey taught you about resilience, belief and creative endurance?
These last five years researching for my PhD have transformed my creative practice and opened up so many amazing new opportunities to collaborate, exhibit and research. These years also advanced my understanding of the resilience and self belief necessary to sustain a creative practice.
I began my PhD in the summer of 2020, with the world in lockdown, my mother increasingly unwell, three young children, teaching commitments and a holiday let to run! Life, as it is for many women, was a constant juggling act.
My art practice and studio became a refuge, a time to devote myself to something entirely creative and self-directed, time to be an artist away from all the other demands of life. We can be made to feel selfish as women, putting our own creative needs above those of our families, but I think without the refuge offered by my work I would have become completely overwhelmed. Whilst my creative practice often had to fit around care duties, these externally imposed constraints turned my everyday practice of walking, recording and making into an act of resistance and escape.
Your work explores the trace of memory within landscapes. Why are you
drawn to the quiet stories that live beneath the surface of a place?
I am drawn to the obscured stories of the people who inhabited this place, but left little trace other than in the marks they made on the landscape. I find it very moving to be able to uncover hidden stories, that are often of the marginal, ignored or forgotten, rarely featuring in official written archives, which were historically dominated by literate, landowning men. I recently created a series of work in Wells Cathedral tracing the witch marks, symbols and letters scratched into the tombs and walls. Although I will never know the individuals behind each story, by highlighting their presence I am acknowledging their existence and importance.
Has creativity carried you through in your life, beyond your career?
I had a fairly tumultuous childhood, moving house and schools many time, and throughout this my creativity and ability to enter a state of flow through creative practice were immensely sustaining, whether this was escaping to the art room, which was always a refuge; disappearing into a book, or sitting outside drawing. My creativity often expressed itself in wanting to curate the environments in which I found myself, to make them as beautiful and nurturing as possible. My husband recently commented that I have spent my life creating a series of little homes. The different houses I have lived in over the last 20 years have become a series of ongoing creative projects, that I am able to share with my family and friends.
We work in very different mediums, ceramics and lingerie, yet storytelling is at the heart of both. Why do you think narrative gives creative work its power?
The title of my thesis - Every Contact Leaves a Trace - was chosen because it encapsulated my sense of landscape as an archive of all that has occurred within it, whether that is still tangible, or subject to erasure through time. One of my favourite pieces of work from the last few years is a photograph of a puddle. On the surface this is an image of a single insignificant moment in time, however, once you look more closely the image becomes about duration – telling the story of the centuries of footfall, tree growth, light, time and presence that must coalesce in order for this one single image to be revealed in the landscape. Artistic practice is a method through which connection and understanding can be created, a way of making these hidden and obscured stories visible, linking places and events through time, through the stories we tell.
When we shot our twenty-fifth-anniversary collection in your Somerset home and studio, what did it feel like to open your personal creative sanctuary to another woman’s vision?
My experience of Fleur’s photoshoot was joyous. It is easy for the familiarity of the everyday to reduce our perception of the beauty of a place. Seeing my home through others’ eyes, as Fleur and the team wandered through the rooms and garden, deciding on the right light and angle, reawakened me to the small moments of beauty that exist in this place. Moments that can become overlooked or forgotten in the chaos of everyday life. Blowsy summer roses and wildflowers, a thread of turquoise beads, western light through my studio windows. It allowed me to see this place again as I had first experienced it.
What happens, in your experience, when two creative women share space, ideas, and energy rather than compete?
Like many artists, one of the best years of my life was my Foundation year. Becoming part of a creative community where ideas were examined and thoughtfully discussed without judgment felt liberating, after years in the rather stifling environment of an English Boarding School. I had found my tribe, a community where individuality and eccentricity were actively encouraged, rather than feared. I met a lifelong friend on my first day, and this friendship sustained us both through the vicissitudes of life, never competing, but often sharing the challenges and joys that come from choosing the life of an artist.
I’ve since worked with many other creative women, whose energy, positivity and expertise is both an inspiration and of great sustenance to me. By collaborating, rather than competing, whether professionally or in our personal achievements, a nurturing space can be created where new ideas can be discussed and trialled without fear, any successes celebrated, and the sting taken out of the inevitable disappointments and rejections, in the knowledge that we have all experienced these highs and lows.
What does it mean to stay devoted to a craft over many years in a world that moves so quickly?
In the post-industrial society in which we live, we are increasingly isolated from haptic interaction with landscape, and from the production of many of the objects and products that we use. Where once these would have been created from the materials available in the places in which we lived, the means of production have become oblique and separate, haptic skills that previous generations would have grown up knowing have largely disappeared.
My creative practice uses processes of printmaking and ceramic hand building that are slow, time-consuming, and have changed very little over many centuries. I feel that there has recently been a renewal of interest in such practices, because of, rather than despite, the speed of the world in which we now live. Looking at or holding an object or artwork, in which the craft, skill, and time taken to create it is sensed, acts as an antidote to the ephemerality of the digital, screen-based world we increasingly inhabit.
The theme for International Women’s Day 2026 is Give to Gain. What does that phrase mean to you personally and professionally?
For me International Women’s Day stands as a reminder of everything we as women have gained over the last century; how far we still have to go in so many areas, and how tenuous and threatened the rights that we have fought for can seem in this changing world. We cannot take for granted our right to education, free speech, or bodily autonomy, but should remember that these are hard-won and precious.
I passionately believe in the power of art to question, illuminate, and create a space where independence of thought is encouraged. My mother taught for over fifty years. She saw her greatest gift as the platform she had to encourage and nurture the talents of each child, understanding the power words have to harm or encourage, seeking always to say a kind word, to praise and elevate. In my own interactions with others, whether through teaching, mentoring or personally, I hope that my words and actions have a positive effect. I am a great believer in Karma, that what we give to the universe will be returned in kind, that acts of kindness resonate outwards and accumulate.
Has there been a moment in your career where another woman’s generosity changed your trajectory?
There have been so many examples throughout my life of women sharing their passion for art with me, and so changing the trajectory of my own life. I was lucky to have a headmistress in one of my early primary schools who was a potter, and brought clay into school. Without her, I might never have known what this material meant to me. A later headmistress awarded me the school pottery prize, gifting me, aged eight, a belief in my own artistic ability.
Recently, my friend Jane Randfield, the technical demonstrator at Bath School of Art. With whom I shared so many unformed ideas and new ways of printing in landscape. Her enthusiasm and interest sustained me through days of repeated printing failures or technical mistakes. But of most significance is my mother, who defied convention by working full-time throughout her life and was passionate about her work. I grew up in a home where creative mess was encouraged, pit kilns were dug in the garden, trips were planned to see obscure artists, creativity and imagination were of preeminent importance and value, and women’s work, ideas, and opinions were of absolutely equal value to men’s. Without this fierce example, I might not have dared to pursue an artistic career in which it is often necessary to call upon reserves of self-belief and determination. I hope that I have created a similar environment for my own children.
Do you believe that giving knowledge, space or opportunity ever diminishes us, or does it expand us?
A significant aspect of my own artistic practice is sharing my own knowledge and
expertise with others. By bringing my arts practice into schools, art colleges, and
community groups, whether through workshops, teaching or mentoring, I can give to others what I was so lucky to be able to experience as a child. A recent project was predicated on creating opportunities for local children and the inhabitants of my village to reconnect both physically and emotionally with the landscape. What was unexpected was the profound impact that this project had on me. In my understanding of landscape, in seeing the freedom with which participants used materials, which sometimes expertise can stifle, in creating opportunities for messy, joyful interaction with material and place.
How important have female friendships been in sustaining both your ambition and your vulnerability?
I cannot easily express how important female friendship has been in my life. If I spend too long without the laughter and solidarity and talk that I experience with my closest friends, I feel diminished and in need of recharging through their company. I am so grateful to have these women in my life, people with whom I can both cry with laughter and with our shared understanding and experience of loss and grief. I was once told that the most important gift is to feel that you are held in someone’s mind when you are not with them. I have felt held by these women, able to share my successes and know that they are celebrating with me, and that at my most vulnerable, they are thinking of me and wanting me to be well.
On this International Women’s Day, what would you encourage women to give more freely in order to gain something greater for themselves and for the next generation?
I think as women, we have often been encouraged to see each other as competition rather than as allies, there is only a certain amount of room at the top table. I hope that through my own work as both an artist and an educator, I can give freely of my time and encouragement, opening up the space for other women and girls, not as competition but as allies and collaborators.
I see in my own daughters a powerful independence and absolute clarity in their own self-worth as women, I hope that we can continue to nurture this wonderful confidence, not to the detriment of the men and boys in our lives, but in the understanding that we as women have fought hard to get to this position of autonomy and independence and that it is up to us all to sustain it.
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