In the Studio: Sharif Farrag

Sharif Farrag is a Los Angeles-based artist and a 2024 Joan Mitchell Fellow. We interviewed Farrag about his work and creative practice in March 2025. The following is excerpted and edited from a transcript of that conversation.

I mainly work in ceramics and drawing. My work stems from a drawing and painting practice initially. With ceramics, I like to create some works that are more sculptural or figurative, and then other works where I’m almost making paintings in 3-D space, dealing with composition and color. I like to layer in stories—characters I make up, people, or other imagery that often subs in for emotions or things I'm going through in life. It’s world building. I think with each batch of work or every year that I'm making, my work is revealing this world to me, and I get to share that with people.

Hopefully, I put enough into the work that people can pick up on the variety of emotions that exist within it. There’s a lot of fun, color, and exciting stuff, but I also put a lot of the heavier stuff I’ve experienced in life in it. I’m always trying to put it in more and more and hope that it translates, so if anyone else is feeling what I’m feeling or they’ve had similar experiences, they might be like, "Yeah, me too.” That’s my hope. And I try to put little things in to surprise people, too.

I see my work coming out of the tradition of California Funk ceramics, being in a lineage with artists like Ruby Neri, Ken Price, Robert Arneson, Viola Frey—working with clay in a stylistic, humorous, personal way, using color and bright glazes and this illustrative approach. I also reference underground comix that were based in the Bay Area in the ‘60s, '70s, and ‘80s—Robert Crumb being a famous artist from that group. I like those comics and I buy them and collect them off eBay. Then I’m infusing that kind of funk aesthetic with my own background and heritage, pulling in shapes and sculptures and references from places my parents come from in the Middle East and North Africa.

My approach to making also comes out of skateboarding and the idea of freestyling—looking at the world and finding ways to work with the challenge. You find a cool set of stairs on a hill and you're like, "I can do something with this." I’ve skateboarded since I was a kid and I try to keep that mindset of improvisation or freestyling in how all of these things blend in the studio.

I have my own studio in downtown LA that I set up in late 2023, after finishing my master's degree. Building that out was a pretty long process, because you need a lot of things in a ceramics studio. But now I’ve got the space to do it, so I'm pretty locked in there for a little bit.

For a lot of my work, I don't plan out too much and just figure out as I go. There isn't a set process that I follow, but there are ways that I can set up a structure to improvise within. Sometimes I'll throw a vase and look at it and start drawing on it. It's almost like doodling, trying to cathartically work through things. And as I do that, ideas come up and I try to work on those at the same time. The clay brings things out.

Even though my work is very improvisational, I also think a lot about craftsmanship. There are a lot of references to Egyptian sculpture and Fabergé eggs and these decorative objects that, to me, had this extreme craftsmanship that is fun for me to use as reference as I try to figure out clay. I'll look at a specific reference and improvise within that form, to remake it into something else.

I build things pretty thick just so I can ship them safely. Thick clay is a scary thing. The bisque firing is really hard and that's where things can really go bad. Even when you take every precaution, it can still bite you. But once it's past the bisque stage, I only fire every sculpture once, unless I add luster which has to be fired at a lower temperature. But for the most part, I finish glazing in one pass, which creates a lot of instances where I'm like, "I don't know what's going to happen here.”

With the surfaces and the glaze work in my pieces, there are a lot of different things going on. I like to use an array of underglazes and glazes in a variety of applications, both experimenting with new commercial glazes, and researching ancient techniques. There’s such a spectrum that you can play with, and every piece that comes out of the kiln contains valuable lessons. A technique I often use is Majolica, so it'll be like white glaze with underglaze on top. I like Majolica because you can make a little painting in ceramics. It’s this way to have windows into little worlds that you can draw. For example, in the piece Traffic Symphony Panel, I wanted to imply that the side mirror of a car was reflecting my self-portrait. It's a great way to use drawing and painting to add a narrative layer to sculptures.

With my glazes, sheen is a whole layer of composition in addition to color. Composing matte, satin, textured, and gloss glazes in a rhythmic way can make clay seem like its a bunch of different materials. You know when you see a Toyota and the matte plastic bumper and gloss paint, the tire's rubber, all those different sheens create a feeling, and through glaze I try to tap into it. But ceramics does it perfectly. The gloss is so glossy, and you have satin matte and matte, iridescent glaze. There's a lot of ancient luster ceramics from the Middle East area, so it's always cool to try to get those sheens. For me, they also look so industrial, when it’s metallic or iridescent—it almost doesn't look natural. Underglaze can do that too. It can make things look really unnatural, even like plastic.

Once I’ve finished all of the glazing, I put the piece in the kiln and see what happens. I really try to respect the medium in terms of what it gives me back because it's not my place to control it completely. I feel like I get really good stuff out of it, but it also surprises me, like the glaze might run or be too thin in areas. But I just feel like, why control something like this that's so beautiful? I don’t want to be like, "Oh, it needs to be this way." I would just do something else if that was the case.

I just finished a body of work for a solo show, Hybrid Moments, which is up through April 19 at Deitch Projects in New York. It’s mostly new work—ceramic sculptures and some drawings. Each one of the pieces takes a while in themselves, so it represents a good amount of work. I'm happy with it. Some of the work has a really personal narrative to it.

The first piece I made for the show is a vessel sculpture called Love Complicated. I think it was the second piece I made working at that scale and trying to imply narrative in a way. There is a story to it, and it has direct symbols everywhere that relate to what I was going through in my life, in this moment when I was dealing with commitment in different ways. I was building this big piece, and then I also got married while making that piece, so I was thinking about my commitment and temptation and different parts of my life at that moment. I was living in Echo Park, so I did a scene in Echo Park with a couple in this red swan boat. There’s a red heron and a green background—just looking for really dramatic looking scenes.

I started with that and then went around the pieces adding more. There are these drawings on the bottom, small portholes into more realistic scenes. So there's my dog or there's the Grim Reaper, there's a fetus, which is just stupid, but intense, like death in life. And then there's a guy on a scooter going through the city, and a goldfish in the ocean, and just different whimsical relationships between things. And then it ends in the area where my studio is, the Fashion District, with this enticing creature who's on top of the store, that's like the sublime—an "enter in if you want" kind of thing. You just either scooter by or go into the store. So, I just go through my life at the moment, try to be honest, and then make art about it—then hide everything behind other things. With some pieces, the symbols and narrative are more direct, like this one, and then in others, it can be more in the background.

In this body of work, I feel like there’s this progression from when I first started ceramics, a work practice. Maybe three or four years ago, I started trying to make work that addresses Western figurative sculpture, like David or Laocoön—these big Western sculptures—thinking, how do I make my addition or express what I feel like now? One recent piece, Second Skin, has this figure that has a tattered, muscle-y, ripped up skin. On the back of the piece, there's a mask that's zipped off, and it’s kind of intimidating. So the piece is about zipping off or taking off the second skin for a second. The figure is cradling its brain and trying to figure out, how do I deal with this putrid brain? So it's gnarly, but then there’s also this Fabergé egg, which I think of as this inner desire or innocence or something coming out from the armor. There's almost a biomechanical feeling to the armor. I was just trying to figure out myself at the moment, but also this figure and this character—kind of putting it into that a little bit.

There are also charcoal drawings in the exhibition that I was making while I was making the ceramic pieces. I made the first one when I was in school, just exploring stuff. And then while I was making the work for this show, I started to go back into that process, making really small drawings. I liked what I did with that early drawing, where I kind of gridded out the paper and worked on symmetry in a weird way. And with the charcoal, I could also get my hands in and incorporate hand gestures, in a way that is similar to clay. The drawings I can do fast, and they have the energy that I want to get out of the clay, but the clay slows me down, it's like walking through literal mud. I could also finish a drawing piece and start another one at the same moment. So it's a nice counterpart for me to just be able to draw these and get ideas out of doodling, which always feels good to me.

I've always drawn on the side, but these works, with the charcoal, have action in them. There's geometry and pattern work, which is always, again, nice to continue in the cultural traditions, Islamic pattern work, and worshiping the divine through geometry. And the symmetry is cool to play with because it weirdly looks divine all the time. Or like hell. It's one of the two. It’s fun to put that in the space with the sculptures, because a lot of the sculptures are about some bigger force coming in. I don't know whether it's a demon or a big friend or what, but there's always these hands coming into the picture.

It was a big push for the Deitch Projects show. I put it all into this body of work, and then we'll see what’s next. I'm just working on my work and have some personal projects. I'm trying to make a big mosaic table, some other things. I'd love to do more shows. I'm just trying to figure it all out.

Interview and editing by Jenny Gill. Learn more about Sharif Farrag’s work at shariffarrag.com.