Dawn Forbes
{Photo Gallery}

Dawn Forbes was raised in Boise,Idaho. She moved to Walla Walla in 1990 to attend Whitman College, where she obtained a B.A. in studio art with an emphasis in sculpture. Drawn to the landscape of Eastern Washington and Oregon, she has continued to reside in the Walla Walla Valley and currently lives in an old church building that functions as both home and studio in Milton-Freewater, Oregon.

In addition to being a professional artist, Dawn has also worked for a number of foundries and galleries. Currently, she teaches ceramics and sculpture at the Walla Walla Community College and is also the exhibition technician for Whitman College's Sheehan Gallery. She is also involved in various capacities with local art centers.

Forbes has exhibited in a number of venues regionally and has also been featured in exhibitions as far away as Alaska and Connecticut. Her work is featured regularly at the Blue Creek Gallery in Walla Walla, WA, Kelly's Mainstreet Gallery in Joseph,OR and Desert Art Collection in Palm Desert,CA.

She works in a variety of media favoring steel and clay, but also delving into wood,bone, fiber and most recently bronze as vehicles for expression.

Her steel assemblage work celebrates the agricultural history of the West, and serves as a means for her to document a landscape and way of life that she feels is too quickly vanishing as more people occupy once open spaces and more farming is being done out of country.

Forbes' steel work is concerned with line and gesture. Important as well, is the character of the metal as she encounters it. The play of positive and negative space is manipulated to create dynamic compositions as old tools, tractor pieces and scrap steel are excavated from scrap yards, field sides and farms and are rejoined with a sense of creative anatomy most often taking an equine form. The horses is a reccuring image in all styles of Dawn's work, a symbol of the West and both physical and spiritual movement.

Forbes' clay and bronze works reveal a more playful part of the artist and her creative process. She forms the bodies of various northwest animals from clay; scrap steel is added after firing to create legs, antlers, ears, etc. The pieces are either painted or raku fired. There is an endearing awkwardness in these forms and a sense of whimsy prevails. As her work travels farther abroad in exhibition venues, Dawn has recently begun molding some of her more popular ceramic forms and casting them in bronze as a way of dealing with the difficulty that arises in shipping the delicate clay pieces. The bronze captures the pieces in a more enduring form and its qualities adds another layer of richness to these celebratory works.

We are pleased to represent her work, and if you have any questions on her available pieces or in commissioning a sculpture for your home, office, or Public Art installation, please contact the Gallery staff.