I have been an artist all my life. I grew up in a family in which both my mother and grandmother were painters, so it was quite natural for me to study painting in college and see myself as a painter. During my thirties, while teaching art and raising two young children, I was asked to teach a high school ceramics class and began a new adventure in clay. This was a tumultuous time for me as well, and I began studying yoga, which changed my life dramatically. In yoga one tries to see that our human nature is part of the divine. Occasionally, we glimpse this in quiet moments when we feel we are part of the whole.

Working in two spontaneous, wet media - watercolor and clay - I like to search for the essence of things, whether it is in a sculpted nautilus shell, a sunflower or small bird. This forces me to strip away non-essentials, search for truth and express the simple beauty I find in a bold way.

When I work in clay, I create from the inside out. I try to feel the inside of a form and shape it without excess. When I struggle with it, it loses life. When I allow it, the clay piece speaks to me, and intuitively I see a fresh design more exciting than one I may have planned in advance. The same is true with painting. My watercolors combine abstraction with drawing from life. I soak 300-pound arches paper, allowing the wet paint to create accidents, controlling the paper as it dries.

Bouncing ideas off each other in these two different media in a playful way becomes for me an interplay that reveals the landscape of my mind. For example, two years ago while vacationing in Florida, I found myself attracted to the nautilus shell. The house I was renting had a fabulous collection of seashells, but nothing as moving as the nautilus with its symmetry and simple beauty. As I began painting it, I encountered its subtle complexities, and couldn't wait to return home and experiment with it three-dimensionally in clay. Later that summer when the director of the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, NY asked me to create a sunflower sculpture, I discovered that the spiral shapes of the nautilus shells and the arrangements of sunflower seeds share a close association with a single, extraordinary number which has earned the name "golden ratio." That thrilling discovery made me feel that what I was expressing in my art was connecting me in a yogic sense with the divine. Creating these forms makes me feel integrated and whole.

My clay pieces are most often high-fired in a downdraft kiln with a reduction atmosphere. I also like to experiment with Raku firing, an ancient Japanese technique.

"...Physically, this power can manifest itself in a wide variety of ways from the voluptuousness of the goddess paintings and clay vessels that Sally Aldrich has exhibited in the metropolitan area to the fit figures that sport today's designs..."

Georgette Gouveia, senior cultural writer

Copyright:The Journal News

reprinted with permission; excerpt from article in Life & Style; "Nectar of the goddesses: Beauty and power," April 27, 2003