Farnham’s Artists in Residence

Anne Wolf specialises in Mokume Gane, an ancient metalsmithing craft originating in Japan that has been revived and gained worldwide recognition in recent decades. Anne also wanted to learn metal spinning, which appears on the Red List of Endangered Crafts, from local British craftsmen.

Her work, entitled Layered Landscapes, is inspired by the local landscape; the fields, roads, hedges, pathways, and farms that surround Farnham. Anne draws attention to how time creates layers of patterns in the landscape – field boundaries and current day roads echoing the forgotten structures of the past.

Quiet Order – Cristina Lorenzet, 2025
Cristina Lorenzet, an Italian ceramicist, spent six weeks in Farnham as our second Artist in Residence.

Quiet Order is the culmination of the second Farnham Craft Town artist residency that Lorenzet undertook in February – March 2025. The work is inspired by the architecture and landscape of Farnham including the tall chimneys that dot the skyline, tiles, and the ventilation bricks at The Farnham Pottery.

Lorenzet’s ceramics often reflect her research into architectural detail and the fragmentary. In the two works of Quiet Order she brings attention to the material complexity underpinning the calm, attractive façades of the town through coloured slips, washes of oxides and a green glaze.

Lorenzet wants to draw the audience’s attention to architectural detail through the subtle and intelligent application of colour and texture to the red stoneware clay surface.

Things We Can Know – Fiona Byrne, 2024

Farnham’s first Artist in Residence, Fiona Byrne, is a glass artist from Ireland.

Things We Can Know is a series of collaborative artworks in response to the inaugural Farnham Craft Town artist residency that Byrne
undertook in February – March 2024.

The work arose from a workshop with local makers, where tools were fashioned with found objects and used to make sketches in clay and paper. Byrne then translated the marks made on clay into glass, both directly by blowing molten glass into the clay, and indirectly by making plaster moulds of the clay.

Playing with scale, dimension, and materials she created a series of forms that reference Farnham’s cultural heritage, drawing inspiration from vernacular architecture, museum artefacts and the area’s history of ceramics.

The final outcome is characterised by Byrne as a work of ‘collective intelligence,’ an assembly of objects from different stages of the making process, including tools, marks and blown glass forms. The work expands the concept of knowledge beyond the mind, viewing
making as an embodied act of active intelligence. A form of intelligence that connects us not just with our bodily selves but into a wider ecosystem of understanding.

Byrne designed the work to be flexible, so that it could respond to each venue in which it is exhibited ‘enabling the artwork to absorb more collective knowledge as it continues to interact with the world.’