Farrah Phillips
Department of Art, College of Fine Arts (MFA)
The Way It Was
Farrah Phillips is a fine artist pursuing an MFA at Florida State University. She specializes in ink, graphite, and installation-based works. She is also pursuing museum studies and curation, expanding on her four years of experience as a gallery assistant for The Art Gallery (TAG) at the University of West Florida. Consistency was not something she was used to while growing up as a child of a military parent. But as she came to know herself more, she found a sense of belonging and purpose in the creation of art. It became the consistency she had been searching for, and she continues to work at it voraciously.
Though her artwork varies in theme, she utilizes earth tones and dramatic uses of lighting to explore reminiscence and the complexity of what it means to grow and cope with living. She holds her origins of representational drawing close to her heart as she traverses the world of installation art, attempting to bring both practices together in a glorious combination of the real and surreal. Taking pride in intricate details, Farrah spends an immense amount of time on each piece, representing the reverence she has for her subject matter and the life she's living by proxy. The goal of her art is to appreciate the world around her, as well as the life she's been given and has lived so far.
Artwork Description:
A special part about working representationally is that the meaning of an artwork can shift and take different forms as time progresses. Recognizable imagery, such as a road trip with friends, changed meaning for me as the years wore on. New relationships started and ended, and old relationships morphed in ways I had never experienced, as they do for many in their early 20s. The purpose for this drawing began as a celebration of a memory, and now it holds a quiet sense of reflection and remembrance for a version of myself that no longer exists.