Artist Statement

"We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence..."
- Annie Dillard

Faryn Davis originally hails from the hills of the western Appalachian mountains where she grew up in a rural mountain setting among cows, endless tobacco fields, and dirt roads. There she spent many days wandering and collecting leaves, tadpoles, bugs, feathers, nests, bones, vials of dirt, clumps of moss, scraps of paper, and other found ephemera and hoarding them away in handmade books and small boxes.

She continues to be a "collector of small, powerful things" in her mixed media art which often incorporates found organic elements into illuminated shrine-like forms, resin paintings, and in her line of resin jewelry. Her paintings combine thick layers of poured and polished resin, painted landscapes and skyscapes, along with real grass, eggs, bones, and plants. They are inspired by the beauty and mystery of the natural world and all of its found things, lost things, fragile things and imperfectly beautiful things. Many of her newest pieces are influenced by living in the Pacific Northwest and its perpetual, foggy grayness.

She pursued art from an early age and studied at North Carolina School of the Arts, in France, Italy, and Nepal, and received a BFA degree in sculpture at the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 2000. She now carries her line of jewelry in over 30 stores and galleries throughout the US, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Store, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum. She now lives and creates art full time at her home studio in Portland, OR.