Fräulein Talents: Lucia Farrow

I want to make every day more sublime than it really is.

I was born in Venezuela to a British father and Venezuelan mother but grew up mostly in LA. My parents never really knew what they wanted or where they belonged, since they had been away from their respective homes for too long to call them home and hadn’t been in America enough for it to be theirs. I lived in many different homes and went to over 14 schools throughout my childhood. My parents were super secular growing up. I had religious friends when I was younger and I wanted their assuredness of the world. Their views seemed more schizophrenic but also streamlined and pointed. I was always looking for God when I was a child, and I think I initially found something sacred with reading, and eventually within museums; ancient sculptures / artefacts / William Blake / Turner. My mother is an art historian/curator and reveres artists. I always saw them as mythical and never thought I was one, or could be one.
By chance, I took a ceramic class when I was 17 in high school and became completely devoted to the materiality of sculpture. It became a funnel for me to run everything through. When I was 18 I immediately moved to London to study at Central Saint Martins. Everyone hated that I wanted to make ceramics there, even in such an untraditional sense.

Over time, this has become clearer to me, but I’m obsessed with the idea of controlled chaos. I have had experiences with ruination; LA is the perfect example of this. It is a city that is constantly in devastation and regeneration: fires, landslides, unstable land, esoteric cults, Hollywood, power, and helplessness. My family’s home is in a neighborhood now infamous for its ongoing landslide.

The kiln is a way for me to make things under pressure transform into something new. I often make things that break completely or are fractured. I’m at the mercy of the kiln, but it’s the submission that brings my work to life. It’s almost as if something has to die and be reborn completely in this painstaking process that borders on masochism.

I also connect the kiln to emotional volatility and the bodily changes that women go through: puberty, periods, childbirth, menopause, death, rebirth. You could relate it to Bataille’s theories of the accursed share leading to sacrifice and ideas of cannibalism, self annihilation plus consumption. In the ceramic process, there is always something dying in order for a rebirth to take place.

I wanted to find a way to use the ceramic medium to create images, or photo paintings, by combining technologies to create contemporary artefacts. I often go backwards and forwards between the digital and physical, a form of material degeneracy. Within my process, I fire ceramic decal images onto ceramic tablets that have already gone through various stages of drawing and scanning.

I obscure the image with oil pastel, almost like a backwards Photoshop. I paint over it until I only have the parts left that I want. It has to be the right combination of figuration and not. It’s about adding emotion to the image through abstraction. I can change the energy, mood, and style of an image this way; the removal of reality allows more space for feeling and intuition. The reason why I always look to William Turner’s “unfinished” works is that the effect they produce is so purely physical.

There is a visual romanticization within my practice, an exaggeration, a way of communicating between beauty and abjection through a squalid girlishness. I conflate art historical references that span from Renaissance paintings to ancient artefacts with the rituals and ceremonies of girlhood online, in order to create Frankensteinian representations of abstract landscapes. I want my images to feel intimate but detached, and also ritualistic.

I like colors that represent freedom or intensity in a way. I have been so drawn to blue recently because of the sky, and a darker blue gray in a way that reminds me of nothing, just void.

Of course, I started posting selfies when I was like 11 years old. Being born in 2000, I think my generation was the youngest at that specific time to have access to being online in the way we did. I grew up thinking about being looked at and looking at other people and images, etc. My work has a lot to do with online aesthetics and girlhood, and the idea of a physical blog. Women have a penchant for self-preservation, I think now more than ever. We want to show the world what we look like now, what we are doing now. When you take an image and post it online it can be there forever as a kind of archive and it also gets totally lost. The ceramic photo-paintings have a lot to do with preservation: I want to make some images completely permanent.

The inside of a stormy sea from a Turner painting.

Dreaming.

Sacrifice.

Feeling in my body when I’m alone. It means I can carry around a secret when I’m with other people. No one will ever know what it’s like to be around you when you’re by yourself.

I don’t know anyone as obsessed with art as my mother; she taught me what true devotion and discipline to a subject looks like.

I think I might be less courageous now than I used to be, I wish I could get advice from my child self. I’m always trying to access her.