Kathy Boortz builds a distinctive sculptural language from materials gathered, recovered, and repurposed from her surroundings. Born in 1948, the American artist is particularly known for mixed-media sculptures that transform natural fragments and discarded objects into stylized animals and human figures. Her practice draws extensively on weathered wood, fired clay, and metal, with the irregular shapes and surfaces of these materials becoming integral to the final compositions.
The material combinations give Boortz’s sculptures a deliberately assembled character, bringing together elements with contrasting textures, origins, and visual properties. Alongside wood and clay, her recent mixed-media constructions incorporate steel, screws, beads, pipes, drill bits, and acrylic paint, creating surfaces where handmade gestures coexist with unmistakably industrial components. Rather than smoothing away the imperfections of found materials, she incorporates their worn edges, uneven contours, and accumulated marks into the structure, making material history an important part of the visual vocabulary.
Animal forms occupy a recurring place within Boortz’s production, particularly birds, whose recognizable silhouettes are reinterpreted through unconventional combinations of natural and manufactured elements. Her sculptures balance figurative clarity with abstraction, allowing a piece of wood, a fragment of metal, or a small painted detail to suggest anatomy without reproducing it literally. This process gives the work a playful but materially grounded quality, while her continued use of collected objects connects the sculptures to ideas of reuse, observation, and transformation.
More info: Artsy (h/t: Dallas Morning News and askART).
