Image Gallery | Exhibition List

About Dawn Holder

Artist’s Statement

This installation explores the concept of the garden, which contains numerous metaphors: for desire, abundance, growth, fertility, youth, possibility, community, stability, wealth, or the passage of time. The garden is an infinitely malleable space of unrestrained beauty and hopefulness, a sensory explosion, a quiet moment of escapism, a joyous collaboration with nature, a perfect edenic kind of place.

In this fabricated garden, handmade plants bud forth from Ms. Holder's innovative recipe of porcelain paper-clay. She sculpts her fragile and detailed forms with porcelain because of its purity of color, supple quality, and history of preciousness. The trees, plants, and flowers are not meant to replicate actual varieties of plants, but rather to capture the idea of flowers, as they live in the imagination.

Gardens, like all living things, transform over time, reacting to the elements, growing, flourishing, fading, and withering. Similarly, this installation will change as Ms. Holder creates and plants new vegetation in the garden. As a result, return visits to the gallery will reveal new experiences to the viewer.

Ms. Holder gives special thanks to her students, Hailey Schumacher, Katie Linke, Jess Schillinger, and Casey Hanrahan, for their contributions to this project.

Artist's Reception

Please join us on February 19, 2010 (6pm–8pm) to celebrate this new exhibition in the ArtWalk at Hartford Public Library, located in the heart of the city at 500 Main Street.


About the ArtWalk

ArtWalk at Hartford Public Library offers one of the largest and most stunning exhibition spaces in greater Hartford and the opportunity for visitors to view art in a magnificent setting in their own community.  The state-of-the art gallery rises above Main Street along a glass wall that floods the space with ambient light during the day and appears to glow as a jewel box at night. Exhibitions will offer an array of art experiences that reflect a variety of media, styles, and cultures in the art world, providing diverse viewing experiences, and allowing for many tastes. Art work is displayed on “floating” wall sections that allow the visitor to discover each piece while never seeing the whole exhibition from one vantage point. Because of the unusual cable system in place, one of the most unique aspects of the ArtWalk is that any wall and lighting configuration or arrangement can change with the nature of every new exhibition. The gallery was made possible through the generosity of donors to the Library’s completed Capital Campaign, especially the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

Previous ArtWalk Exhibitions:

Stanwyck Cromwell November 6 - January 15, 2010

Chet Kempczynski, May 1 - August 31, 2009

Exhibit sponsored in part by: