Paige Farrell

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a multidisciplinary artist. As a ceramicist, I work with the simple element of clay, a mineral rich erosion of the earth’s crust over thousands of years. The process embodies a quiet simplicity, allowing me to be in a deeply introspective space. My hand-built, organic shapes take thoughtful patience and careful, frequent attention, during both the sculpting and drying processes. Working with clay is a respite of sorts from the heady rigors of writing, and the multi-faceted rhythms of my work with wine. I work out of my home, and at a lovely, tranquil studio in Pigeon Cove, where I am quite literally conjoined with both nature and a lightness of being. 

As a writer, I find inspiration from the quietude of contemplation, the landscape of language and the convergence of the two. 

As a fine wine professional for over thirty years, I have dedicated time as both a wine director, sommelier, educator, writer and consultant. Early on in my career, I came to embrace wine as more than just a beverage. I consider wine art, a portal to my love of the poetics of language, and a gateway to communicate creatively the essence of wine. 

Art of any medium asks that we slow our pace and listen to what we see, hear, and feel.

For me, the relationship between wine and other arts—painting, ceramics, sculpture, photography, writing, music, dance—and our understanding of them, our relationship to them, lies within the echo of the pause, as the poet Pablo Neruda so beautifully intoned in his Love Sonnets XVII, when he wrote of loving, “secretly, between the shadow and the soul.” 

EDUCATION

WSET(Wine & Spirit Education Trust), London, UK/Boston, MA -- Level 4 Diploma, Global Wines

School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston, MA -- Certificate, Art As Process

University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst, MA -- B.A. French Language and Literature

Sorbonne University, Paris, France -- A.S. French Language and Literature