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Interview
January 31, 2025

Evolving Forms: Interview with Sean Irwin

About the Author

See the exhibition here

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Brilliance in the Mundane is an exhibition curated in partnership with Park Towne Place. It features five artists, Kevin Broad, Sean Irwin, Bruce Hoffman, Warren Muller, and Gerri Spilka, who celebrate the beauty inherent in the everyday.

Sean Irwin is a mixed-media artist whose work has recurrent themes of alarm, emergency, new beginning, and hope. His sculptures in Brilliance in the Mundane are intricate, chromatic collections of accumulations that focus on the physical act of making.

What is interesting to you about recycling everyday materials such as sawdust or dryer lint?

What I find interesting about casting in general is the ability to cobble together different shapes and textures into the construction of a mold. Any bits of corrugated tubing, industrial patterns, plastic rubbish or fabric can create an interesting composition when combined. It’s always a surprise when I pull the mold away from the casting material to see what I’m left with. 

Casting in art and industry is usually connected with materials like bronze, aluminum, iron, plaster and resins, all of which I’ve had extensive experience with. What I like so much about casting sawdust and resin are their unique character traits. Colors can vary based on wood species or what the articles of clothing looked like. Textures can vary, wood chips, fine dust, clumps of dog hair that were attached to a shirt or everyday items that were left in one’s pants pocket and thrown into the wash. All of these things can find their way into and contribute to my castings. 

What is also interesting is the damage that can occur when I’m separating the mold from the finished casting. Often, because the drying time takes so long, the casting can peel and tear where it wasn’t dry enough or was stuck. I embrace these accidents and incorporate them into the composition.”

Your sculpture is both organic and geometric, with a variety of colors and textures. How do you balance these contrasts, both philosophically and within the composition?

“The balance of geometric and organic shapes is a technique that I continue to employ today in my mixed media drawings. These ideas originally showed up while sitting out in front of my home, drawing on the sidewalk with my young daughter. She had her marks and scribbles going in a rainbow of colors and I started making simple bold shapes. I played with all of the chalk; primary colors, glitter infused and neon to begin drawing concentric borders around my shapes. Eventually those concentric lines intersected and evolved into newer and bigger forms. When I began “tattooing” my cast forms it made sense to incorporate this geometry with its concentric wanderings. 

I especially enjoyed working these colored lines of glitter over and through the variety of terrains that the castings offered up. My shapes and lines would run smoothly over a flat and smooth surface, and then plummet into a crevice at a hard angle. It was great watching as these lines built up into ribbons of color as they traversed the surfaces.

I usually kept the castings their natural colors or mixed raw graphite into them. I wanted a clear distinction between the surface and the shapes and lines being laid down. I like the idea of raw and unvarnished combined with the colorful glitter shapes and lines.”

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