The Artist Siri Hollander
A Spanish Childhood "My folks moved to Spain when I was 3. I basically grew up in my dad's studio. They handed me clay and I started making things at probably 4 or 5, a very young age. It was just something that came naturally to me. I liked the earthly materials from the beginning"
Living With Horses "I was around them all day, every day. That's all I pretty much did as a child. So, when I started working, it was kind of the natural thing to express. While I'm welding, which is the beginning stage of my sculpture, you don't really see what you're doing. So, it's coming through me, as opposed to following any kind of line. They come out however they feel like coming out."
On Abstraction "My horses tend to be gentle and quiet with not a lot of action, because that's the natural state of a horse. Most of the time, they're sedate and content, and the movement that I do put into them, I think, is through the abstraction of the form and the texture. we used to go to prehistoric caves when I was young. On the walls of a cave, the textures are almost the same as the textures that I use. All those earth tones and the way that they project on a rough surface was very similar."
Connection "My work seems to bring out an emotional response. The people that have my work, that love it, they almost feel like it's part of their family, almost like it's part of their herd."
Next Hollander is working on a new series of steel pencil drawings.
