Born and educated in Paris, Iren Handschuh (b. 1951) emigrated to the United States in 1971 where she began working in a women’s carpentry collective.   In the 1980’s she worked in general construction, cabinet and furniture making in the Boston area, Cape Cod and the Islands. She studied architectural drafting at the Boston Architectural Center, and began working as a sculptor in the late 1980’s, moving away from the high precision of fine woodworking – what she refers to as “the tyranny of the 64th’s of an inch”  -  to the freedom of working organically, even primitively, in the tradition of Art Brut and Art Modeste.

         Utilizing the simplest of natural elements (wood, stones, sticks, bones, pits, etc.) in her mobiles and stabiles, Handschuh treats movement as an artistic element.   Wind is a cathartic, even whimsical force, ultimately representing the sheer mutability of life.   Like the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely - whose Dadaist works have influenced Handschuh - believed, “Everything transforms itself, everything modifies itself ceaselessly.”   Her works show off her complete command of the formal elements of balance, mobility and rotation. As sculptor Paul Bowen will attest,  “Iren taught me everything I know about wood and wind.” Her philosophical sensibility is based in ironic, even pun-is, metaphoric humor:  “If the human experience had a pit, what would it be?”  –  is the pulse of her work.   Her capacity for inventive wordplay – “cheapicity” of materials – reflects her innate and prolific ability to re-think, and re-see the most simplistic natural elements.   Handschuh works them together into constructions that are aesthetically elegant and conceptually interesting – and often spiced with an absurdist sense of humor, Handschuh’s very unique je ne sais quoi.   

       
          She has exhibited her works in galleries in Wellfleet, Provincetown, Nantucket, New York and Japan.  Handschuh is represented by the Berta Walker Gallery, 208 Bradford Street in Provincetown.

THE MOVEABLE STUDIO

The way for an artist to live in a degenerate time
is to mock, to satirize, to document the decay
-Mark Vallen, artist

 ART TRANSFORMS.  Not only in the literal sense of the plastic and aesthetic transformation of materials, but more importantly in its transformational impact for the artist, the viewer, and sometimes, as with “The Moveable Studio,” the community at large.

Like so many others, Iren Handscuch  (a Wellfleet resident since 1989) is an artist deeply affected by the escalating crisis in affordable housing and artist workspace in our community and its recurrent consequences:  the loss of actual art making and their creators.   The loss has been – and remains – incalculable.

As she shares, “…the real estate on the Cape, the paucity of work space, and in a very personal way, all my friends are leaving town and I’m hurting, personally and artistically, my companeras are leaving town.

I’m having a reaction.  I’m having a visceral reaction, and I’m angry, and I transform the energy into this statement that makes me laugh, I’m sublimating my fury into something that makes me and my friends laugh.  And so I think it’s very important to make social commentary with a punch of laughter.   That reaches me much better than raw anger.  It’s like a great ambassador.

 “…artists are leaving Provincetown and Cape Cod, because they cannot find places to work that are inexpensive.  I aim to raise public consciousness to the need for affordable workspace by designing and constructing “The Moveable Studio,” a structure on wheels, a fusion of a hauling apparatus with nautical components that creates an enclosed work space  Windows provide light, ventilation and a field of view of about 280 degrees.  It is economical, compact, weather resistant and very mobile, with all terrain capability.  It can be moved by hand or hitched to a vehicle and it has an unstealable view.”

“The Moveable Studio” is crammed with Handscuch’s unique constructions in a sort of visual double entendre:  illustrating both the bursting energy and productivity of the artistic impulse at the same time thwarted and cramped by the lack of adequate workspace:  “…a  sense of you’re busting out at the seams because you don’t have the appropriate space as an artist to create.”

Handscuch refers to this as her  “community project,” paralleling her own (economically necessary) peripatetic and minimalist lifestyle.  During the summer season, Handschuh lives in her trailer in a local campground wherein all life’s necessities are compacted (including rent), and then like the legions of others without secure housing, moves each fall for the winter.  “I call it ‘the hobo studio’” for the itinerant artist who “picks their view, or intention.”

“The Moveable Studio” represents a long tradition of artists who value their work not just as “art for art’s sake,” but as a means of engagement with the world – from Kathe Kollwitz and other German Expressionists, to sculptor Louise Bourgeois, and our own Jay Critchley (“Septic Summer Rentals), and so many others before and after.

Handscuch’s wish  for her community:

 “This is my political statement, now a performance.  Use it.  Borrow it.”

 At the conclusion of the PAAM exhibition, “The Moveable Studio” will be moved to the Berta Walker Gallery, 208 Bradford Street in Provincetown where local artists may make arrangements to borrow the moveable studio.

Eileen Kennedy
Provincetown, August, 2006