BACKGROUND
Ireen Brock hails from an ilk of artisans + craftspeople, and has been a doer, maker, learner, and builder her whole life, dabbling as an artist / designer / illustrator / calligrapher, an operations extraordinaire, an attorney, a sneaker expert, and even a state trooper, too.
Born and raised in the coal region of Pennsylvania (aka "The Skook"), Ireen has lived in Philadelphia, New York City, Salt Lake City, and now calls SoCal home. You can often find Ireen tinkering with copper, painting, sculpting, designing spaces, dreaming up new things, and more recently, chasing after her two young kiddos and military husband. Ireen is book-learned too, holding a bachelor’s degree in media communications + technology and a juris doctorate degree in law.
WORK + INSPIRATION
Life is often an unbelievable journey to those things we’ve imagined and also those things we never could conjure. This truth has revealed itself in Ireen’s life in many ways and acts as a prominent theme in her work. To Ireen, copper is a metaphor for our human experience and there is a humanness in the substrate’s ability to change over time—due to the exposure of outside forces—that she aims to exploit. There is beauty in our personal struggles, our emotions, our evolution, our redemption, which has become the tentpole of Ireen’s visual storytelling.
Ireen has been working with copper for more than a decade, beginning with a gigantic 3D sculpture that burst out of the walls of her first apartment in Philadelphia (and unintentionally sold from there, too). Since then, Ireen has evolved and refined her work through processes that are entirely her own creation. Experimentation is a the heart of Ireen’s work and with each piece she methodically aims to learn more from the substrate. Along the way, Ireen grounds herself in the process and difficulty of working with copper as an art medium, and she enjoys the challenge of copper’s finicky nature, physicality, and strong demand for patience.
FAVORITES
Design (home/interiors), experimenting with new materials, Sara Berman and her closet, matcha! matcha! matcha!, Russ + Daughters bagels, Martha Stewart + Kid Cudi, pull-ups, tiny things, Levain cookies, impromptu dance parties, the month of October, business books, rainy days, the most charming Marine, a miniature dude-man, a curly babe, and the absolute best Carolina Dog-o.