Melanie Deegan

Melanie Deegan builds her sculptures from the inside out. Each piece begins as a three-dimensional wire and steel armature — a kind of drawing in space — before being layered with cotton, jute scrim, and recycled coffee sacks, and finished with Jesmonite to a surface of genuine tactile depth. 

Originally trained as a woodcarver in the 1980s, she returned to sculpture full-time in 2008 after years working in data analysis. That interval shows, in the best sense: her work has the focus of someone who chose it deliberately. Equestrian subjects sit at the core of her practice — horses caught mid-movement, reduced to their essential gesture.