Lost & Found

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Words by Jessi Devenyns  Photos by Eric Morales

Barbara Irwin’s gift is an indestructible sense of wonder. For her, everything, including recycled items are an antidote against the boredom and disenchantment that she immortalizes through her sculpture. And for what she does, there is no retirement age.

At 76 years old, Barbara Irwin diligently sits on her stepstool in her studio tinkering with a variety of objects as she waits for the parts to eventually take form and manifest a whole. She herself does not create art. Instead, she finds that the objects sculpt themselves and, in the process, her view of the world.

For Barbara, art is playtime. As a former Montessori school teacher, everything comes back to two simple ingredients: hands and curiosity. 

Even before she began working with her own hands to shape recycled materials into thoughtful collages and sculptures, Barbara said she was compelled by their shape. Part of the fascination stemmed from their dexterity, their complex nature, and human dependence on materials for everyday interaction. However, as she later had confirmed through her Montessori school classes, her fascination was well-founded. She insists hands are the key to the brain which unlocks her creativity. “I had always collected hands,” Barbara confessed. “I had all kinds of hands…a little hand that was a vase, or it could be a mannequin hand, or it could be a hand that was a glove mold.” Though it began with opposable thumbs and phalanges, today, those objects only make up a fraction of her collection. 

Despite the bounty of her treasure trove, Barbara is discerning in what she collects and stores in her tidy, slightly crowded, home. In fact, it is almost as if the home itself has become a sculpture and a homage to the beauty of everyday items.

Much of what Barbara collects are simply found objects, and most come from Airport Boulevard where she routinely canvases for the perfect piece for her creations. From I-35 down to Springdale Road and back again, Barbara treks alongside the four-lane thoroughfare filling her bag with what she describes as “castaways.” 

Notwithstanding the trashy nature of her collection, Barbara sees her art findings through a bisected prism. In part, she admits that her scrap scavenging is simply “[me] doing my small little bit to save garbage from dumpsites.” At the same time she observes that, “I’m trying to encourage people to see the possibilities of taking things that are broken, torn, or messed up, and somehow seeing it in a different way.”

Oftentimes, she won’t be sure what she is searching for until she finds it. She giggles like a child, and her eyes light up when she explains that her art is like a treasure hunt, and it is her curiosity that propels her through the streets to find each gem. Only once the castaway object has found her, the art begins. Or as Barbara puts it, “it just kind of grows from there.”

The only problem she says is choosing which idea to pursue. “Everything has its beauty; it’s just how we see it.”  

Contact
(512) 482-8163
3905 B Grayson Lane
foundobjectart.com