women artists

Washburn’s work touches on notions of recycling and environmentalism. She culls her materials including masses of collapsed cardboard, newspapers, stone, plastic cups and scraps of wood she encounters while out and about from local loading docks, alleyways and recycling bins. She then stacks, binds, and nails together her discoveries. She organizes and even paints some according to her own complex color-coding system. Washburn sees the dichotomy in the materials she gathers which are so prevalent in our consumer culture—cheap, lightweight, adaptable, and disposable. They are invaluable and worthless at the same time. This notion of recycling pervades her practice beyond collecting the materials in that each installation’s materials are often re-used and re-assembled into an entirely new and unique work.