style
| profile
Dawna Holloway
After working as an electrician, and surviving a thrill-packed career as a sidecar racer (that’s her clinging to the back of a motorcycle, below), Holloway helped start a new Seattle-based lighting company.
WHO: WHAT: Standard Socket founding member WHERE: Seattle
from sidecar racer … … to lighting designer
34
Standard Socket burst onto the Northwest design scene earlier this year, it was anything but standard. Started by four Seattleites, the company promised high quality, unique lighting produced and manufactured locally. Dawna Holloway, one of the founding members, arrived at her new career in a roundabout way. Until 2008, she was traveling the world as an international sidecar racer. Never heard of such a thing? Neither had Holloway. “One spring, I went to a road race at Hoquiam [Washington] to watch a friend,” she remembers. “After his event, around the corner came a wild, sideways, sliding three-wheel drifter. And that was it; love at first sight.” Holloway relished the thrill and travels that the sport allowed, but it didn’t exactly bring home the bacon. Looking for something more lucrative, she asked the president of the Washington Motorcycle Road Racing Association about his job as a master electrician, and eventually started apprenticing for him. The new line of work paid off, and soon Holloway’s primary interest in lighting began. As her fascination grew, Holloway took classes from the Lighting Design Lab in Seattle to learn more about illuminating spaces. Eventually, she ended up working with Darin Montgomery of Urbancase on a lighting project, and the duo found they enjoyed working together. With that, Standard Socket was born. “It’s filled a gap between my technical and creative side,” Holloway says of the company. “It’s sculpture combined with lighting.” »
Rob Mader, Scallywag
Photographed by redstone pictures
When the lighting collective
GRAY ISSUE No. SEVENTEEN