Each year Farnham welcomes an Artist in Residence to work in our craft community and share their skills. We are England’s first World Craft Town, and are committed to supporting artists and makers through a series of annual residencies. Each of our Artists in Residence is asked to create a piece inspired by Farnham, which forms part of our local craft collection.
Applications are normally accepted during August and September, and the Residency takes place in February and March.
2026 Artist in Residence
This year we opened our Residency to artists working in jewellery and metalwork and we welcomed Anne Wolf, a jeweller from California. She wanted to investigate the landscape of the Surrey Hills and incorporate that inspiration into her work.
Anne 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.
2025 Artist in Residence
Cristina Lorenzet, an Italian ceramicist, spent six weeks in Farnham as our second Artist in Residence.
Cristina’s work is inspired by the architecture and landscape. She investigates the environment to identify architectural details, fragments, materials and clues on ways of constructing. This visual observation becomes a library of information that is then translated into textures and informs her choices of colour and surface decoration to provide a sense of place and narrative.
Her final piece, Quiet order, is a pair of small sculptures decorated with coloured slips as a tribute to Farnham’s ceramic heritage. It reflects on the quiet order of our beautiful red bricked market town, and includes textures inspired by her work with our community.
2024 Artist in Residence
Our first Artist in Residence, Fiona Byrne, is a glass artist from Ireland.
She worked collaboratively with local makers to consider the ecosystem of making, discussing how materials, tools, space and people come together to form collective intelligence.
‘Things we can know’ is a collaborative artwork in response to her residency in Farnham World Craft Town. The piece builds on her exploration of intangible forms of knowledge, and making as an embodied act of active intelligence.
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 industrial history of ceramics.
During her residency she exchanged skills with local makers and students, trying out new techniques and experimenting with pushing her skills further. There were successes and losses in the process, yet all of these learning experiences formed part of the thinking around the formation of the work.
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