As part of the exhibition programme for Underfoot, artist Sara Dobbs is leading a free Sculptural Insect Workshop on Saturday 24th January 2026 from 11am – 12:30pm where families will create their own insect sculptures using fabric and paper.
To book your spot(s) for the workshop please click the button below:
Underfoot, features a new series of textile pieces and paintings by Dobbs, in the Paul Henderson Gallery. Informed by a background in agriculture, her practice explores the terrain as both a living system and a vessel of memory, history, and growth. Rather than a single physical surface, the land is dynamic, an intricate layering of soil, roots, insects and microbes, where what lies beneath sustains what is seen above.
The private view will be on Thursday 15th January from 6 to 8pm and the exhibition runs from 15th January to the 14th February 2026.
Sara Dobbs is an American artist based in London whose interdisciplinary practice spans painting, textiles, and sculpture. Drawing on her background in agriculture and her experience co-founding and managing a diversified farm on Vashon Island, Washington, Dobbs explores landscape as a living system shaped by memory, labour, and interdependence. Her work considers the terrain as both a site of sustenance and disruption, where layers of soil, roots, insects, and human action continuously transform one another. Dobbs’ community-focused engagement with food systems, including her leadership of the Food Preservation Initiative from 2022–2023 at the Vashon-Maury Community Food Bank, informs her interest in the unseen infrastructures that support daily life. In 2023 she was commissioned by the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture to create a public artwork for the Seattle Center’s Founders Court. Dobbs holds an MFA from the University of Oxford and a BA (Hons) in Painting from the University of Edinburgh. She is the recipient of the Helen A. Rose Bequest, the Astair Prize, and the Alexander Flynn Bequest.