Frank Irby

Giving life to recycled wood

— PNCA faculty —

Lively ceramic creatures and bristly wooden vessels fill the shelves of Frank Irby’s office in the PNCA 3D building. A full-time faculty member whose artwork resides in the permanent collection of the Contemporary Crafts Museum, Irby is known for his work in ceramics and his ability to inspire students. Now he’s applying his unique perspective to wood sculpture.

“This is how I see the world,” he smiles, gesturing at the shelves. “The pieces are actually people, or maybe animalsÑit’s more than just the wood. There’s a sense of animation… there’s even a kind of violence to some of them.” He points to a small piece teeming with spikes. “It takes a while to understand that.”

Still, a sense of playfulness pervades the wood sculptures, mirroring Irby’s humorous perspective on life’s ups and downs. He grew up in an Army family, living mostly in Southern U.S. states and in Okinawa. He began to draw as a child but didn’t pursue his artistic path. “I thought an artist was a mystical kind of being, and I didn’t think I was that,” he says. During his undergraduate years at Memphis State, he discovered an affinity for three-dimensional work and went on to receive his MFA in Ceramics from Alfred University. He moved to Portland in the early 1980s to teach at PNCA, and was represented by the Jamison/Thomas Gallery.

After a table saw accident badly injured his hand, making it more difficult to work with clay, Irby eventually moved his focus to wood. He deliberately takes the additive approach of ceramics and applies it to wood. Rather than starting with a large piece and carving it, he begins with numerous source materials, almost all of them found, recycled, or recovered. Wood shop dumpsters, estate sales, and the Goodwill Bins are among his suppliers. “I hated the concept of cutting the trees down and then throwing so much of it away,” Irby explains. “The sources can be anything, as long as there’s enough of it.”

The pieces look unmistakably contemporary. Irby, however, grounds much of his process in traditional approaches. “My ideas donÕt come before I find the wood, they come after. IÕm kind of Old World in that respect; I make objects.” Direct contact with his materials forges another link with traditional craftsmanship. “I use a lot of hand tools, I try not to use power tools at all. It’s a very physical act, cutting the wood by hand, drilling by hand.”

“I don’t think art is all that mystical,” he confides. “It’s a job you go to, you do it every day. Things come out of it because you do it every day.” The same can be said for teaching. “I think there couldnÕt be a better job on earth. I love to make the art, and I really love to teach. I really like the interaction.”

He enjoys helping students grapple with the fundamentals of thinking three-dimensionally while giving them room to make their own discoveries. Irby says, “I think you have to allow students to have different ways of working, to know that there isn’t just one way… Art can be about almost anything.”

photo credit: Barrett Rudich, written by Tiffany Lee Brown

BFA Majors

Communication Design
General Fine Arts
Illustration
Intermedia
Painting
Photography
Printmaking
Sculpture