About the Artist
"There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself."
- Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, 1983
Duncan Sherwood-Forbes is a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist and designer specializing in linear metal sculpture and continuous line drawing. Duncan uses sinuous curving line to animate his abstract portraits and figurative work, pulling inspiration from modern and contemporary art as well as graffiti, craft, and outsider art. His work has been featured in galleries around the country and is owned in private collections around the world.
An atypical learner and autodidact, Duncan's obsession with art began in his early childhood in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Regularly attending programs at the nearby DeCordova museum, Duncan built his artistic skills throughout childhood and early teenage years. He first began creating wire sculpture at 15 after being given a copy of Calder’s Circus by an instructor at the Putney School for the Arts in Vermont. Duncan fell in love with the ability of wire to draw in space, and his career as a wire sculptor was born.
Duncan attended the art-focused Concord Academy for high school and continued attending the Putney School for the Arts' summer intensive program yearly, where he learned to weld and work with glass. In 2007 at the age of 17, Duncan began showing his work at the Featherstone Gallery's summer fine art market on Martha's Vineyard under the name Wired Sculpture Studios, and had his first two-person juried art show in Concord, Massachusetts in 2008.
After a gap year spent studying architecture and language in Barcelona and taking classes in screen printing and website design at Mass Art, he went on to study sculpture and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis in 2009. He continued selling his wire work while in college - despite the complaints of some of his university professors - showing at galleries as well as participating in an invitation-only craft fair at the St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum.
Due to disagreements with the art school faculty and personal struggles, Duncan withdrew in 2013 shortly before graduation and returned home to Massachusetts. Here he began work as a docent at the Institute of Contemporary Art where he created and led gallery talks for visitors while continuing to refine and sell his wire work, with a focus on portraiture.
Duncan fell deep into alcoholism during this time, and he underwent treatment in 2014 for alcoholism and PTSD from childhood trauma. After creating the foundation of his sobriety, he moved to Los Angeles and threw himself into helping others full time. While working on the professional side of the recovery industry, Duncan put his art on the backburner but continued to sell online and through occasional in person events.
In 2019 Duncan's wire work began growing in popularity, and amid several large scale commissions combined with disillusionment with the money-driven toxicity of for-profit healthcare, Duncan applied himself full time to Wired Sculpture Studios. In 2020 he was accepted into the Freehand Gallery in Los Angeles, a premier shop for the finest craft art in America. Currently Duncan works full-time as an artist and designer.
In Wired Sculpture Studios Duncan focuses on the design aspect, creating dynamic and sinuous steel drawings for businesses and private collections around the world.
In his fine art practice Duncan uses a wide range of media as the situation calls for it, delving into spaces of trauma, recovery, and identity. In 2022 he has begun furthering his work through the introduction of poetry and ceramics. He continues his study of art theory and contemporary practices, and is always at work refining and redefining his studio methods.