Artist and longtime Newtown resident Patricia Barkman invites readers to her art show and sale, Saturday, June 7, from 2 to 4 pm (rain date June 8, same hours), and to observe closely the art she has installed on the walls of her art gallery, a charming, old fishing shed at 49 Taunton Lake Road.

The art includes a Thailand puppet with two faces on its rotating head, titled “Two-faced Janus of the Corks.”

Janus is a god of Roman mythology who represented beginnings, transitions and endings. The god puppet, caught in a box of old wine corks, looks to the future and to the past at the same time.

Also set in a box of corks is a wire bicycle and a monocycle suggesting, “Give Me Your Answer True.”

Taken from “a bicycle built for two,” the option of having her say “Yes” or to ride away on her monocycle is the theme of the art piece, according to the artist.

Old-timey quill pens, with a feather over the bottle of India ink, suggest the writing implements of yesterday. Other art pieces include a combination of spools of thread mixed with corks, titled “Threads of Time.” A little whittled bird included in a setting of corks is a gift from the artist’s friend now long gone to whittling in heaven.

Other found objects include light sockets wired on an old board to resemble little persons, drift wood to suggest birds, or other animals. Old oil cans create “A gardener dancing the ‘Can Can,’” while “Writer Getting Rid of a Mental Block” is in the writer’s corner, and “Philosopher Receiving Inspiration” could be the title of any of Barkman’s people-bas-relief pieces.

Old watercolor-paint tubes adorn the peony bouquet.

The purpose of the art, according to Barkman’s Artist’s Statement, “is to bring a smile or possibly a chuckle.

“Some puns involve Dad’s watch repairs, old tools, rusty nails, corks, old barn wood, drift wood, leftovers from catch-all drawers, tool boxes, demolition sites — art instead of a trip to the dump. Multiple hands, multiple memories, have touched this art,” the statement also notes.

Barkman does not worry about the expanding use of artificial intelligence.

“AI poses no possible threat of ever producing art this way,” she says. “It’s a mixture of glue, screws, old wire, little gifts from cherished people, corks from many an enjoyable sip of wine with friends, bicycle trips, attempts to ride a monocycle, clothes pins from place cards at a Thanksgiving dinner, old hinges, old latches, old pens that wrote letters to loved ones, old spools of thread left from when women (and a few men) sewed their own clothing, quills from a peacock, hinges from old furniture and an old pulley from something or other.”

Besides a loving grandmother, other lucky circumstances have allowed Barkman to flourish, “not in a Dinner-Plate-Dahlia ‘Leonardo-da-Vinci’ way but in a roadside-daisy, old fishing shack way where tiny flowers bloom.”

All are invited to visit the fishing-shack-turned-art-studio on June 7. A reading from her latest book, A Tale of Two Nations, 1776-1792, will be offered at 3 pm.