Lisa Farris

I have been working in clay since I was 17 years old, yet I didn’t really find my artistic voice until I became a mother. For years, I would make vessels that were entrenched in functional ceramics — tall skinny bottles with elaborate stoppers, coil pots with curves like a hip. My teachers kept asking me: when are you going to face the fact that you’re actually making figures?

Then I had my children and found myself in a world of preschool drawings. I loved how my boys’ self-portraits were so essentially joyful yet stripped down to the basics: Big head. Bodies optional. Legs that swept on forever. Hands like oversized flowers. It wasn’t just the beauty of their drawings, it was HOW they made art. How they cast off judgment and analytical thinking and just went for the feeling. I tried to emulate this process. The more immersed I was in this mindset, the more freedom I allowed myself in clay. I played off the awkward relationship between shapes and scale: really, really big heads on wee little bodies. Eyes that take up an entire face. Playful patterns. Colors. Unexpected juxtapositions.
The more I worked like this, the more I began to see how universal this art-making process was. In fact, it seemed like every preschooler drew figures in the same basic way. What was even more amazing is that I started to see connections between what my four-year-old was doing and all of those ancient objects I’ve swooned over from the Met or the Field Museum: African Masks, celebratory tribal costumes, crazy-elaborate headdresses and baubles. It seemed so collective to me: Our age-old endless need, from the time we are children, in every culture, in every era that we humans have to render our own image and to make it fancy.

I love this so much. I love that a thousand years ago someone felt the urge to scribble a picture of himself on the wall of a cave with the same fearless abandonment my boys had with finger paints. There is a childlike awe and urgency to these old figurative artifacts, like the makers couldn’t help themselves. They just had to make put their image on the handle of a spoon, or on the base of a drum, as if to say: Here I am. I am alive in the world and it is so much fun.
That is what I’m after in my art. As I build and play and make my figures, I am trying to tap into how alike we all are. How we all feel the need to express ourselves with childlike freedom. I am trying to get people to see it — all of our humanity. All of our joy.