Artist Talk ~ Duncan Sherwood Forbes

From paper and pen to wire and air, Duncan Sherwood-Forbes creates sculpture that uses air as medium. Forbes captures figures in mid-thought, breathtakingly suspended in time.

The Grand Gallery is excited to announce the opening of Duncan Sherwood-Forbes – Weight of Air. Forbes is a multimedia artist based in Oakland specializing in figurative metalwork. His sculptures have been exhibited at galleries and art fairs both nationally and internationally. His approach to wire is rooted in line drawing. “I use wire to divide air, treating space itself as the primary medium.” This effect commands your attention as the figures appear to be suspended in mid-thought. The negative space is just as relevant as the wire itself.

“Like contour drawing, my version of wire sculpture traces boundaries. The core element of sculpture, that differentiates it from other media, is the use of mass. My work is an inversion of that tenet: the wire sculptures do not occupy space so much as propose it; they describe form through absence by using material not to depict the subject directly, but to outline where it would be.”

There is so much freedom in Forbes’s work. The lines appear to have been lifted off the page and magically transferred to air. It’s this reassignment of air as medium that makes Forbes’s work a must see.