Fay Farmer, Noongar artist and member of the Goreng people, was born in 1953 in Narrogin, Western Australia, and raised by her grandmother. She moved to Gnowangerup in 1969, the year she met her husband, and returned to Narrogin in 1973. Between 1978 and 1985 she and her family lived at Marribank, near Katanning, which was previously the Carrolup Native Settlement. While there she was a member of the Marribank Artists Cooperative, which established a thriving business selling a range of textile and ceramic work in the 1980s. This was a particularly exciting period in Farmer’s artistic career. Farmer is also a painter who draws her inspiration from the landscapes and colours of the south-west region of Western Australia, and creates works which depict native animals and food sources such as bobtail fish, goanna and emu. She is also a singer, and has undertaken studies at Abmusic in Waterford, Western Australia.
Farmer has five children, one of whom, Peter Farmer, is a successful Noongar artist who has exhibited widely in Western Australia. Her works have been acquired by the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Berndt Museum of Anthropology, and one of Farmer’s vases, created while she was at Marribank, was included in the 'South West Central’ exhibition at the The Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2003. In 2009 she was living in Perth and had enrolled in a Certificate III course in Visual Arts and Contemporary Craft – a course coordinated by Joanna Robertson at the Kidogo Institute in Fremantle, Western Australia.
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- Writers:
- Fisher, Laura
- Date written:
- 2009
- Last updated:
- 2011
