Farraday Newsome: Unseen Drift

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 16, 6-8pm

Farraday’s subject matter is drawn primarily from nature and the emotional allusions and metaphors found in nature. Her color work celebrates the light and exuberance of day, while her black-and-white work delves into the shadowy, more emotionally complex realm of night and darkness.

Artist Statement: My home and studio are in the Sonoran desert city of Mesa, Arizona. I share my studio with fellow ceramic artist and husband, Jeff Reich.

I have worked within the format of the vessel for over twenty years, exploring ideas of lushness, sadness, time, and grace. My surfaces are very painterly. I am interested in the combination of painterly space with the actual space of the three-dimensional piece. For the past five or six years I have been glazing fields of natural and artificial objects that have personal symbolic meaning . These are generally familiar objects, such as watches, fruit, dice, shells, seedpods, eyeglasses, bones and insects. My personal narrative becomes a freeform drift open to association.

My clay is a red terra cotta. The first layer on my bisqueware is a coat of either white glaze or black glaze. This sets up a general light or dark atmosphere, and emotional intent can be developed from there. My imagery is built up by brushing multiple layers of colored glazes on top of the white or black glaze ground.

Biography

Farraday Newsome grew up in the redwood forest of California. She is the daughter of Barbara Newsome, a businesswoman and masterful gardener, and George Newsome, a painter, potter and dinnerware designer who earned his degree in ceramics at Alfred State University, studying under Daniel Rhodes. Farraday studied biology as an undergraduate (BA, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1976) and later earned her graduate degree in Art, Ceramics Emphasis, from San Francisco State University (1987). She currently lives in the Sonoran desert of Arizona with fellow potter and husband Jeff Reich. Together they run Indigo Street Pottery in Mesa, Arizona. Both also teach pottery at the Mesa Arts Center.

Farraday is a widely exhibited artist whose work can also be seen in such galleries as Cervini Haas Gallery (Scottsdale, Arizona) and Katie Gingrass Gallery (Milwaukee, Wisconsin). Her work is included in many collections, including the Luce Center of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Racine Art Museum’s Wustum Museum in Racine, Wisconsin, the Prague Museum of Decorative Arts in the Czech Republic, the Ohio Crafts Museum, and the Arizona State University Art Museum. Her work has been featured in many books and magazines over the years.