Nadia Fairlamb

Nadia Fairlamb sculptor, art teacher, art restorer hand crafted sculptural mirrors from tropical hard woods beautiful decorative wood sculpture art restoration art classes for children and adults. Harmonious, balanced, patterns and designs humans have used to decorate their lives with for the last 20,000 years fascinate and inspire me. I live in Hawaii, and my time in, on, by the ocean, fills me with awe. The kind of awe that simple, pure, free of limiting thoughts, beautiful and harmonizing. I see in the ocean currents and waves the same shapes and designs my ancient and recent ancestors used to decorate their lives with.

When I prepare the designs for my sculpture, I close my eyes, meditate and go into how it feels to be in that beautiful and harmonizing energy, then I close my eyes draw, erase, draw again, then open my eyes and fuss around with the balance and symmetry of the shapes and lines until it looks like how it just felt to me.

After that comes my favorite part! Using my jig saw to cut the shapes out of the wood. I get to see how far I can push the saw and the wood, how I can cut the shapes Sumi-e like, the beauty of each individual stroke of the (saw).

As a self-trained wood sculptor, I attempt to use my jigsaw the same way another artist may use a paintbrush or pencil. I want to keep the delicacy and beauty of a drawn line alive as I use my jigsaw to cut away each design and form.

Having grown up in Europe and Australia, I was surrounded by ancient, timeless symbols, in architecture, imagery, furniture, and tools we used every day.  This sparked my passion for art and archaeology, and I earned my BFA in Sculptural Ceramics with in depth studies in Archaeology and Botany from Steven F. Austin State University. During college I worked as a technical illustrator of archaeological artifacts and as a technician at a stained-glass window company. My art is also influenced by over 20 years spent training as a dancer and yoga teacher and meditator.