Garland Magazine, To Touch, 1 Dec 2023
Touchstones: The sensual work of studio potter Jane Sawyer
by Carolyn Leach-Paholski
Now darkness falls,
quail chirps
what use hawk eyes? (Basho)
Garland Magazine, Issue 21, Dec 2020
Blood Moon: Ceramics For A Fragile Planet by Jane Sawyer
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eighty years of sam: the collection. Exhibition catalogue, 2017
Shepparton Art Museum, catalogue essay by deputy director/curator, Anna Briers.
pages 140-41
Massage Series
Journal of Australian Ceramics, Vol 56 No 1, 2017
"I stumbled, or slipped, into the red quite by accident. I didn't realise that searching for illusive reds would become a journey that would last decades."
The Studio Potter, US, Vol 40, No 2, 2012
"Touch is our first earthly experience. Before language it is how we know. It is how we describe the world to ourselves before we have words." By Carolyn Leach-Paholski
Ceramics: Art + Perfection, No. 73, 2008
"Jane Sawyer’s work is a contemporary interpretation of hakeme brushwork popularised through the Japanese Mingei movement.The Mingei movement was founded in the 1920s by Soetsu Yanagi and celebrates the humble beauty in everyday utilitarian objects." By Shannon Garson
Fresh Instincts, catalogue essay, Freeland Gallery, Sydney, Australia, 2007
"These teasing vessels are finely balanced between awkwardness and elegance, indolence and vitality, playfulness and solemnity. They are forever in a state of becoming." By Peter Timms
Craft Culture website, 2004
"Jane Sawyer has created a language of humility... though she maintains a Japanese rigour in her work, she breaks certain traditions attached to materials."
Kevin Murray, director Craft Victoria, The Fundamentalist Urge in Contemporary Ceramics
Dancing with the Unknown, Pottery in Australia, Vol 39, no 1, 2000
"To accept that inert, hard, object contain movement doesn't seem so difficult, but dance? Do we dance with clay? And i my case, with the wheel? What place choreography? What is my dance?..."
Jane Sawyer
Sense: An Intimate Response 2001, adapted from Artist to Artist, 2000
"Intimacy implies a close and knowing relationship. The bond between partners of any kind and especially between an artist and her work is firmed by the depth of passion, commitment and respect developed over time. Sawyer’s intimacy with her materials is like an affair of the heart and the flesh. In her hands the clay is not there to be fashioned but a collaborative partner and mentor. The demands of the artist are guided by the response of the material."
Chris Marks
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Australian Ceramics, Volume 39, No 1 March 2000
"The use of slip as decoration has been a constant source of motivation - the inviting, fluid quality that it takes on just before it dries - no longer shiny, yet not quite matt; the way that the surface of a pot can convey the freshness of the touch of its maker - confident, fluent and vigorous."
Prue Venables