Dyan Ferren is a self-taught artist who has been creating assemblage sculpture from natural and manmade discarded materials for the past 30 years. Born and raised on the East Coast, she moved to coastal Alaska in 1985 and credits the wild and beautiful surroundings of that remote and beautiful state for generating her passion to create sculptures with touchable materials that are unique, colorful, and bursting with texture. She relocated to Idaho in 2014 and enjoys discovering new materials in the high desert environment to utilize in her sculpture.

Her sculptural work has a story to tell of our modern society’s propensity to collect material goods which eventually end up being discarded as trash. Her goal is to utilize art as a universal messenger to encourage all people, young and old, to share in the responsibility to become part of the solution to reduce, reuse, and recycle materials to minimize the impact on the environment and improve the health of our planet.

“I create assemblage artwork with found objects, natural materials, vintage oddities, unrecyclable plastic, and most passionately, objects discarded on beaches, in rivers, parking lots, and roadside streets and highways. My inspiration originally stemmed from decades of collecting objects on remote beaches, forests, and tundra in Alaska before moving to the Treasure Valley in 2015.”