Sandy Caldow (1961–)

Sandy Caldow is a member of the legendary Collective Effort Press. Her work merges visual poetry with sculpture, particularly ceramics.

From Ella Skilbeck-Porter’s catalogue essay ‘Interactions, ecounters and material memory in Sandy Caldow’s visual poetry’:

"Caldow concentrates on the look, sound and meaning of a word, paying profound attention to individual words and forging visual poems through the interactions of these physical concrete qualities of sound and appearance. Nothing is taken for granted, and each poem arrives to use having gone through a transmutative process, either sculpting, cutting, collaging and sometimes firing in the kiln, painting and glazing.

As Sandy Caldow notes,

When I’m building a sculpture or a pot, I scrape back the surface a lot. I’ll work on the inside of the form with my other hand on the outside, gently moving up and down the inside and outside at the same time to fine tune the form. And writing a poem is like that too."