Kathy Bussert-Webb: Healing From Nature and Discovering Her Sculptural Materials
October 1 - 31, 2026
First Thursday Art Walk - Thursday October 1st, 5-8pm
Reception & Artist Talk - Saturday October 24th, 4-6pm
Scavenging nature, Bussert-Webb explores value and worth, sustainability, ecology, memory, and trauma in expermental materials.
Artist Statement
My practice explores nature as witness, healer, and teacher. I sculpt from humble and organic materials—flora, thrifted treasures, natural pigments, paper pulp, and experimental materials. I alter overlooked objects into forms that speak to loss, resilience, belonging, and renewal.
Drawing from Arte Povera and ecological art, I favor materials with histories and imperfections. I experiment with processes rather than impose fixed outcomes: sewing dried kombucha SCOBY, building bas-relief, and combining sculpture with collage and painting. These materials carry evidence of change. Their vulnerability mirrors mine.
Nature has been my refuge. As a child, I felt like an outsider and found belonging outdoors – hunting mushrooms and berries, gardening, camping, and tending poultry. My Hungarian mother, a resourceful refugee, taught me to improvise. That ethic continues in my studio: respectfully use what exists, waste little, transform much.
My work also reflects a personal movement from trauma toward healing. White and black evoke rebirth, while light and shadow suggest uncertainty, mortality, and renewal. Natural orms and animal imagery become metaphors for protection, separation, and resilience.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing deepened my awareness of human-nature reciprocity. Wangechi Mutu and Joseph Cornell influenced my use of found objects, assemblage, and surreal imagery. Yet my work grows from a personal conviction: nature has my back. I invite viewers to look slowly, discover the unexpected, and consider nature as witness and healer.
About Kathy Bussert-Webb, PhD, MFA
Kathy transforms discarded objects and materials from nature into sculptural reflections on healing, resilience, and the human-nature connection. Humor and unexpected materials often enter the work, giving difficult subjects a playful edge.
A material researcher, she published a 2026 report in an EU repository documenting her art innovations, including dried SCOBY, a kombucha-making byproduct. She has received awards in U.S. juried exhibitions, presented six solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Canada, and completed nine art residencies in Spain, Costa Rica, Canada, and elsewhere.
Her art and writing appear in international magazines, journals, and books, including 101 Artbook: Nature Edition. Her work is in private and public collections. She is a member of Gallery 110, Equinox Studios, and the Puget Sound Group of Northwest Artists. Kathy earned her MFA in 2022 and is Professor Emerita in literacy education. She juried a 2025 group exhibition in San Diego.
About: Healing from Nature & Discovering Her Sculptural Materials, KBW
This exhibition connects nature, loss, and healing through organic materials and reclaimed forms, as mother earth has my back—witnessing, transforming, and helping me heal.
I am drawn to objects with histories. Found materials carry evidence of use, damage, and change. Rather than conceal these lives, I highlight them. This practice connects to Arte Povera, eco-art, and circular art, where ordinary materials challenge conventional ideas of value and beauty. The work asks: What happens when something broken receives another life? Natural pigments deepen my connection to earth. I favor materials that decompose rather than exist indefinitely, questioning art’s expectation of permanence. Impermanence is not a flaw; it is part of nature and life.
Birds appear as alter-egos—symbols of freedom, vulnerability, migration, and rebirth. They embody the tension between leaving and belonging: the pain of watching someone fly away while recognizing that flight enables transformation. Through anthropomorphism, I give animals human emotions while allowing nature to mirror my experience.
Light and shadow recur metaphorically. Shadows suggest grief and indelible experiences; light implies awareness and new beginnings. Shadows and light coexist in nature. Healing does not eliminate darkness; it means learning to live with it and finding light within it. Interconnectedness underlies this work, as we are part of nature. Nature can heal and regenerate. A broken branch grows again; a landscape recovers; life emerges from decay. This resilience mirrors my own process.
The work is personal yet universal. It reflects coming to terms with loss and impermanence while discovering freedom and inward rebirth. These works are also acts of love—conversations between humans and nature, destruction and regeneration, grief and wisdom. Nature is not simply my muse. She is my collaborator, witness, and teacher, reminding me that even after loss, life can spring back.