Olympia sculptor captures the plight of refugee women and children in clay
The sculptures of Irene Osborn — stark white figures of refugee women and children, caught in painful and often terrifying circumstances — are at once surreal and all too real.
Faces are twisted with fear, grief and rage. Openings in the figures’ backs reveal secret stories. Frightened children are held captive in plastic cartons that once held apples at Costco.
“I am trying to put a human face on suffering,” said Osborn of Olympia.
“Separated Children in Commercial Facilities,” the piece made up of 30 individual figures encased in stacked plastic containers, is included in a virtual exhibition at the Hammond Museum in North Salem, N.Y.
“It’s unspeakable,” Osborn said of the children being held in for-profit detention centers near the United States’ southern border.
“That was a long project,” she told The Olympian. “It was emotionally difficult to do the unhappy children. And each one had to be different. I couldn’t do one like another. I had to do that feeling again and again.”
Also among the 30-plus pieces in the series are “Reaction to Family Separation,” a bust of a woman with two faces — one screaming in anger, the other drooping with profound sadness — and “In Front of the Immigration Judge,” a child figure without arms, a visible sign of his helplessness.
Since she began work on the series two years ago, Osborn has shown the sculptures several times. She was one of six artists selected for South Puget Sound Community College’s 2020 Juror’s Invitational. Both she and Olympia painter Lynette Charters of Olympia are collaborating with fiber artist Leonie Castelino on an exhibition examining the effects of the pandemic on women, scheduled to show at the Hammond in September.
In a video interview with Osborn, SPSCC gallery coordinator Sean Barnes spoke to the beauty and power of her work.
“It’s compelling work and points to a lot of things that we’re all experiencing in some way or another right now,” he said. “The world seems to be getting smaller very fast.”
Despite the attention the work has generated, Osborn hasn’t offered any of the pieces for sale. As emotionally intense as she finds it to make them, she wants to keep them close to her.
“If I sold one, it would be like a tooth was missing,” she said. “They make a story. They belong together. If one piece were missing, I would miss it.
“For me, art is emotional,” she added. “My work is very personal, but not autobiographical.”
The lives that fascinate her, though, are not that far from elements of her own past.
She is herself an immigrant. Though it ended before she could crawl, it was the events of World War II that most profoundly shaped her and her art.
She was born in Würzburg, Germany a month after the Allies bombed the city, killing about 5,000 people and leaving 90 percent of the city in ruins. So she grew up amid the ruins of war, surrounded by people who’d endured multiple traumas, but no one talked much about what had happened.
She emigrated to Canada as a young adult, and came to Olympia in 1984.
“When the immigration crisis here started, it hit home,” she said. “I had to say something.
“When the Nazis were in power, my parents couldn’t say anything,” she added. “They would have been taken away. They would have died. Here, at least we can say something.”
Though her parents were both art historians, Osborn didn’t find her way to art until she was 60 years old — and then, it was by accident rather than design.
“I had gone through chemotherapy and all kinds of other stuff, and my daughter said, ‘You should do something. Get yourself out of your funk. Go back to college,’ ” Osborn said. “She gave me the Evergreen catalog.”
Osborn signed up for art history — it was, after all, part of her own history — and discovered that The Evergreen State College courses required her to make art as well as study it.
“We had to make a tree of life out of clay,” she said. “We had to draw. After a year of that, I preferred to do than to study. It was a great revelation.”
She graduated in 2010 and began seriously working in clay. From the start, her pieces addressed the injustices she saw in the world, and in particular the plight of women and children.
“If I use my words, nobody hears,” she said. “If I use my sculpture, at least my limited circle hears more than I could reach with my words. I want to evoke empathy in others.”
This story was originally published December 30, 2020 at 5:45 AM.