Annabel Faraday

Annabel discovered clay at Farnham Art School through Saturday morning classes in the early 1960s. After studying at Winchester Art School and Croydon College of Art, she later gained a BA(Hons) in Sociology and a PhD in Lesbian History at Essex University. In her early 40s, she returned to ceramics as one of the initial students on the City Lit Ceramics Diploma course in 1989.

Annabel’s work is rooted in a fascination with the gradual transformations caused by corrosion, erosion and weathering. Living on a stretch of the Sussex coast, she is drawn to the surfaces and structures found in coastal and edgeland environments, where the effects of time, exposure and neglect create unexpected forms of beauty. Popular seaside amenities sit alongside abandoned industrial sites and forgotten structures, their remnants continually reshaped by salt, wind and sea.

Working mainly in black and brown stoneware clay, Annabel hand-builds ceramic sculptures exploring the textures, colours and material changes produced through weathering. She is interested in the tension between deterioration and renewal, and in the way decay can reveal rather than diminish the character of an object or place. Her work reflects an ongoing dialogue between manufactured forms and the forces that transform them.

Annabel is a Selected Member of the Craft Potters Association and has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Her work is held in the collections of the Potteries Museum, Stoke-on-Trent, the Museum of the Home, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig.