Firefighter Rescue Statue

Painted Post, New York

In 2007 Barbara Parsons was an unhappily-married mom living in subsidized housing when she saw the Tom Hanks movie "Castaway." For reasons that are not entirely clear, it inspired her to become a welded-metal sculptor, even though she had never done anything like it before.

With her professional alter-ego, "Barbie the Welder," she was commissioned to make a sculpture for a First Responder's Park in a town near her home. She spent time at the local firehouse researching equipment, then created a gold-painted steel sculpture of an anonymous firefighter wearing an air tank and a gas mask, rescuing a child clutching a teddy bear. The pair descend a ladder propped against a gravity-defying window somehow suspended in mid-air, with the hot breeze from the fire blowing the curtains outward.

It was unveiled on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, September 11, 2021.