Many ceramicists throw vessels for solid objects – plants, fruit, more art.

Sarah is making vessels for light. Most artists won’t produce their best work until they have been through some serious challenges. You could say spinning pain into gold is any artist’s true vocation. There is one reason Sarah's lights are just so uplifting to look at, and not only after the bulb inside is switched on – it’s because they are beautiful. She has transformed years of alienation and deafness-enclosed solitude into shining works that invite and inspire.

At the National Art School, Sarah returned to her original craft and produced luminous works more vivid and delicate than even I could have predicted. When Sarah Tracton’s lights are suspended, they emit a rich honey glow as if ancient oil lamps are shimmering off a gold-plated Menorah. Yet these are lights that inspire wordlessly. No liturgy, blessings or sacrament can express what the lights say, because they speak through showing, they beam.

Sarah has gradually decluttered her own spaces as she has travelled and moved around for her art. She concurs with people who care about interiors that objects retained should be beloved and even perhaps beautiful. Our world is just so full of unloved stuff, she told me. She is not interested in high concept, low craft artworks. She wants to make fancy, gorgeous, special pieces that people can love and use. If this is what being an artisan is, perhaps Sarah has achieved that career goal, but to me there is more than successful craft in place when I see her ceramic pieces plugged in and switched on.

When I see these pearlescent porcelain shanks beaming, I feel the urge to celebrate the talents of this emerging artist who has emerged from the chrysalis of deafness to fill our world with light. Times are tough, and the earth thirsts. Art is still needed to blast our consciousness with brightness when the world feeds on darkness.

Around this city, in every town, young people and old are looking at themselves. The helpless magnetism of eyestealing screens wants your heart, your mind. It’s OK to dally in the electronic netherland, with desires and appetites never quite fully sated. The blue beams from your life online also gradually seep into the spaces of your imagination until it’s flooded. Yet Sarah’s ceramic lights are a beacon back to the solid land, the earth from which her clays were dug.