The Shape of Things to Come

by Jill Duff-Hoppes

For ceramic artist Sarah Johnston, working with clay is a healing experience. And it’s one she wants to share with everyone, from children to older seniors.

Sarah is the founder and executive director of Community Clay Connections, a nonprofit organization that provides hands-on, clay-based art classes focusing on mindfulness, increasing mental and emotional health, and helping people feel connected to themselves and one another.

“There are so many therapeutic qualities about clay that really help students focus the mind,” says Sarah, who lives in Winter Springs with her husband and teenage daughter.

Research shows that participating in the arts, whether molding a lump of clay or playing notes on a musical instrument, can help improve a person’s overall health.

“Art really does help calm people down, center them, bring their stress levels and blood pressure down,” says the 46-year-old Sarah.

From the Steel City to The City Beautiful

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Sarah earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, with a focus on ceramics. After college, she taught art for alternative school programs and ran a senior center in Pittsburgh. In 2018, Sarah moved to Central Florida with her family.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Sarah found herself struggling with mental-health issues. Combining meditation with a clay shaping technique known as pinching proved to be her saving grace. That’s when Sarah felt driven to start a nonprofit using art to help others, and Community Clay Connections was born. After the organization received its 501(c)(3) status, it was awarded a community project grant by United Arts of Central Florida for 2024-2025 – which allowed Sarah to offer five free clay workshops for young people at libraries and community centers in Seminole and Orange counties.

The workshops included gratitude bowl projects for tweens at Seminole County Library branches in Sanford and Casselberry last year. Participants learned pinching, coiling, and slab work techniques and got to decorate and color their bowls, which Sarah later fired in her own kiln and returned to the libraries for the kids to pick up. Gratitude bowls are exactly what they sound like: bowls meant to hold written notes of gratitude.

Community Clay Connections also offers workshops on creating meditation bowls, hype mirrors, positivity tiles, and helping-hand dishes.

Be Mindful

“Every project of ours has a component of mindfulness,” says Sarah. “Mindfulness is not very complicated to practice. It’s really just getting your mind to calm down and think about what’s happening right now in front of you.”

Kids at the recent gratitude-bowl workshops sculpted scaled-down versions of two much larger gratitude bowls Sarah created and exhibited a few years ago, one at the library branch in Casselberry. Both pieces (also funded by a grant from United Arts) were six-foot-tall art installations with slits carved throughout. The goal of the project was to engage the public by asking them to write down their answer to the question “What are you grateful for?” on a slip of paper and slide it into one of the vessel’s slits. More than 1,000 kids and adults participated, with answers ranging from “My cat” to “Grateful how my son is handling his cancer – with grace and trust in God.”

Sarah, who has a master’s degree in art education from the University of Central Florida, has exhibited her own personal artwork at The Orlando Pottery Festival, Osceola Arts, CityArts in Orlando, and The Clay Studio in Philadelphia. In March, one of her pieces will be on display at the Orlando Museum of Art for Women’s History Month. She also teaches clay classes at Crealde School of Art in Winter Park, where she is the program manager for the ceramics department.

Sarah hopes to be able to offer more free clay workshops at local libraries and other public spaces in the future, which were all well-received in their respective communities.

“We tend to get a nice variety of students who don’t usually get their hands on clay,” she says. “We think that’s valuable. And, I like the idea of having art be extremely accessible and not only in a gallery.”