Back to Pat Frederick Gallery

I am a wife, mother, and veterinarian. I have worked professionally with horses, dogs and cats since the late 1960’s. Working with animals you love and helping their bodies be more functional is addicting. I have ridden barrel horse, reining, event horses and dressage.

I was able to realize my desires to practice art when while living in Australia and went from ceramics to painting to sculpture. Welding is more like drawing, with metal armature, which then gets texture and mood added to it in a patch work quilt of animal and body substance. Another medium I use is bronze which harkens back to the mythology of past centuries in heroic images.

Horses “make” Heroes. The very act of grooming and mounting a horse is a heroic enterprise from beginning to end. The bronzes and steel sculptures shown are the beginning of an odyssey of the mind, which began in my childhood and will be realized figuratively and sculpturally in the progression.

Horses have been figuring in the life of mankind for many centuries and besides elevating us above our fellows in height, they have eased life and helped us travel faster. They have been imbued with heroism in mythology in their relationship with gods and goddesses and have at times created the heights to which the mythological characters rose.

Horses protect, befriend, inspire, heal and take people on inner spiritual journeys. They are messengers between man and the gods.

The carousel is used in representation of the Carousel of Life. We go in a circle from our first to last moments in life. The transformation of our psyche and goals are what make up the story told on the carousel. When mounted armies were replaced by guns and resorted to games on horseback rather than deadly combat, they were questing to grab a brass ring or impale something similar with their lances. Grabbing the brass ring in life is a metaphor for living life to the fullest and becoming a hero on your own carousel and mounted on your own horse!