To the untrained eye, the object lying next to a trash bin at Carnegie Mellon University is a black leather glove.

To Jennifer Gooch, it was a cold, neglected symbol of loss and loneliness. So the Carnegie Mellon art student gently lifted the glove from its sidewalk resting spot yesterday, smoothing a whimsical cartoon "missing a glove?" sticker in its place.

Ms. Gooch, you see, is the glove rescuer.

Roaming the streets of Pittsburgh on her bike, she leaves no glove unturned. And two weeks ago, she set up the Web site, onecoldhand.com, "a site for the collection and hopeful reunion of Pittsburgh's lost gloves."

The idea is that the site will serve as a clearinghouse both for those looking for their missing gloves and those who see lost gloves and don't know what to do with them. Or, as she puts it, it's "like a dating site for those forlorn, abandoned lumps, useless without their mate."

The idea of loss figures prominently into many of Ms. Gooch's mixed media artistic works, and she also views onecoldhand.com as an art project.

"To me, art is about making connections," she said. "This site is about making connections."

In the Dallas area, where Ms. Gooch grew up, it was occasionally cold enough to merit wearing gloves, but not cold enough that finding a lost, solo glove was a common occurrence.

She moved to Pittsburgh to pursue her Master's of Fine Arts degree at Carnegie Mellon. And during her first Pittsburgh winter, which she flatly calls her "first winter," she was struck by streets littered with solitary gloves.

In March, she picked up her first glove, a sleek brown number lying on Centre Avenue near Whole Foods. "I felt this awkwardness in picking it up, but it was getting wet," she said. "It's lambskin."

By the time she picked up a zigzagged blue mitten in a hallway at Carnegie Mellon this October, she was inspired. She spent several hundred dollars setting up a Web site and printing the "missing a glove?" stickers, finding out only this week that some of her expenses would be covered by a grant from the Sprout Fund.

She's also e-mailed friends encouraging them to join her in glove collection. With her friends forwarding her e-mails on, she's already received gloves from people she doesn't know.

As of yesterday, she had collected 23 gloves, about two-thirds of them found by others.

She often finds gloves along the side of the road, and she speculates that the separation often occurs as someone gets out of a car. When the door opens, one glove might fall, with the glove's owner unwittingly turned into a Michael Jackson impersonator.

She's still waiting for her first reunion between a pair of gloves, though she seems to have collected one pair of matching, lost gloves -- one yesterday next to the Carnegie Mellon Dumpster and one on Tuesday in front of the Cathedral of Learning.

"The site is bittersweet to me," she said. "It's set up for this benevolent aim that might not really be realized."

She is currently working with a few local businesses to post glove collection boxes there, though nothing is finalized yet. For now, "finders" can arrange glove donations or request stickers by e-mailing onecoldhand@gmail.com.

She is eagerly seeking additional gloves, and hopes to have at least one from every city neighborhood. She also hopes that the site will be a model for other cities, and already has two friends in Brooklyn working to create One Cold Hand NYC.

In the spring, Ms. Gooch plans to present the lost gloves as an exhibit exploring the project as a metaphor for the cycle of loss and gain.

Jon Rubin, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's School of Art, said Ms. Gooch's work is really no different from a painting hanging on a wall at a gallery. Both engage people by expressing a greater idea about some aspect of life.

"To me, what's noteworthy is mining the everyday for meaning and significance," he said. "Jenn's not going to some exotic location dealing with some priceless object. She's dealing with something that we all deal with daily."

Since moving here, Ms. Gooch has lost three gloves of her own. And since she now knows how it feels, she treats her orphaned gloves lovingly, painstakingly photographing, cataloguing and displaying them on her studio walls.

"They're kind of like people to me -- they are people," she said. "They're from someone, kind of like parts of people, the shell of a hand. They represent people in a small moment of loss."