In her 20s, armed with a master's degree in sociology, Greensboro native Bryant Holsenbeck had an epiphany. She was working on a kibbutz in Israel and had a musician friend who was always practicing on the cello.

"I realized that art is important; art can be a job," she recalled.

"It was the most earth-shattering thing to me, to think you can do what you love. It doesn't have to be 'saving the world.' "

Since then, Holsenbeck, 58, of Durham has devoted her life to art, starting with ceramics and moving to basket weaving and fiber arts.

She still does her part to save the world by combining all her skills to make environmental art.

Sometimes that means using natural materials, and other times it means creating objects that direct attention to the fragility of nature and life.

Weaving a future: After returning to the States, Holsenbeck spent a winter on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts, where she learned to make traditional Nantucket lightship baskets.

"I thought, 'What if I did it just this way instead of the way they taught me?' "

From there, she discovered she could improvise. She moved to Carrboro because, she said, "I wasn't finished being Southern," and set up shop as an award-winning basket maker.

"I kept liking doing them, and I kept selling them and getting attention. I liked the repetitiveness."

Reed to fiber: Holsenbeck got into the finest craft shows and started teaching, but eventually she grew tired of baskets.

So she taught herself to knit and sew and started to make hats.

"Each one was different and I could put all sorts of bizarre things on them." She started working on sculptures with found objects and made earrings out of broken records. "People starting leaving stuff on my porch."

Stuffed up: Over the years, Holsenbeck -- a founding board member of Scrap Exchange, a nonprofit clearinghouse for stuff in Durham -- has made art using items from shoes to chopsticks. One of her best-known collections is a series of birds made of cut-up credit cards.

"As a collector, I'm interested in what things have powers to us, what things we choose to collect," she said.

Painful process: One of the artist's current projects is an altar she was invited to create for a show called "Artists Make Altars," organized by the Collectors Gallery and on view through March 22 at Long View Gallery in Raleigh.

"It's just about killing me to do this show," Holsenbeck said before it was installed.

Her altar is a tribute to two close friends, Jim Hebert and Frances Lyn, both of whom died from cancer within the past five years. "Jim was a brilliant software engineer and a great supporter of my work as an environmental artist," she said. "After he was diagnosed, he said, 'All right, I'm sending you all my medicine bottles.' I got these boxes for three and a half years."

Lyn, her closest friend, died within three months of her diagnosis.

Tribute to friends: Holsenbeck finally mustered the courage to open Hebert's boxes, knowing she would use the pill bottles in her altar. She was shocked to discover a few bottles from Lyn as well.

"I didn't remember that she gave them to me," she said. "I was too busy helping her die. It really rocked me when I found them."

The business of death is "scary and horrifying," she said. "Those bottles are ugly. I thought, 'I have to soften this.' I'd been on all these walks along the Eno River with both Fran and Jim, and Fran was on the Eno [River Association] board.

"So I picked up all these acorns in my yard and on walks. It was a repetitive thing, a gathering. I put them in the med bottles and around them. The bottles are about living, and the seeds are about life."

Bound to happen: Among Holsenbeck's latest offerings are handmade journals, some with batik on the outside and others covered with candy wrappers, old book covers and collage.

"I loved this book class I took and then I taught myself how to bind all these kinds of books," she said. "I get all the paper from the Scrap Exchange. I love the repetitiveness of the process. They're way underpriced, but it's a meditation I do. I'll stop at some point."

Something to crow about: Holsenbeck's favorite creations of late are her crows and rabbits, especially the crows. She's not sure how she latched onto them, but she has enjoyed learning about them.

"People have relationships with crows," she said. "They're just fascinating birds."

She makes the animals with wrapped fabrics. "They have a wire frame and then I keep wrapping, cutting, twisting, tying, and stuffing, and wrapping and wrapping. I use old fabric, a lot of it upholstery fabric, because it's got a great texture."

"I'm really a fiber artist, so it's all about repetitive motion. Collecting, sorting, stacking. If nothing else is going on, I'm knitting. In some ways, making the animals is like making the baskets. I'm sitting back in a chair where I began."