Betsy Irwin prefers working in 3 dimensions. Her personal artwork has been expressed mostly through gourds and hand-built ceramics. Most of what she exhibits today is work with gourds. She creates contemporary art as well as ritual and utilitarian objects from this oldest plant intentionally grown by humans. Throughout history, gourds have been made into bottles, bowls, baskets, dippers, dolls, birdhouses, jewelry, ornaments, and musical instruments.
Her use of metal leaf on gourds, particularly when it’s flashed, along with staining all of the gourd’s interior and sections of the exterior black are reminiscent of Raku, her favorite type of pottery. “It just gives the vessel and ancient, earthy feel.” People tend to stereotype all gourd work as craft. She must frequently explain that, “Yes, I paint gourds, but I also cut and carve them, wood burn, sand and stain them, and, frequently, I like to apply metal leafing on sections of my work as well.”
Her designs are often determined by a gourd’s attributes and how it “speaks” to her. “For instance,” says Betsy, “When I start a sculptural basket, I look for a much thicker gourd, one able to withstand the torque of its handle as it twists up the top of the piece (see Stairway to Heaven). Sometimes I have a particular plan in mind (see What a Tangled Web We’ve Woven); most times the gourd has ideas of its own.” When she moved out west, she discovered many similar symbols to those she had experience in the U.S. Southeast, altered somewhat through space and time, but essentially with the same meanings. Many of these symbols represent important aspects of the cosmos. Many of the designs on her sculptural gourds are abstracted forms of the four elements (air, fire, water and earth) intertwined with spiritual symbols and creatures that appear as she starts penciling on the vessel.
After acquiring basic technical knowledge, she learned to grow gourds and had amassed over 1,000 of them by the time she moved to New Mexico. “I still want to return to pottery — I just need to use up most of these gourds first!”
“If we choose wisely, this planet can give us all we need for EVERYTHING on it to thrive,” she says. “The global society we live in tends to separate us from nature, ignoring that we are irrevocably intertwined with it. We’ve forgotten many simpler, more earth friendly ways. I hope my art provides a good example of how ancient and modern technologies can be intertwined, and offer solutions for many of the problems we’ve created by inadvertently distancing ourselves from source.”
