Sculptor Beth McCubbin Creates Meaning from Waste

Beth McCubbin spent a lot of time picking through the gutters as a child. While other children played games, she gathered garbage off the streets and hauled it home to see what it could become. That early impulse to salvage and create has never left her. Today, she identifies as a visual artist and sculptor, but the core of her work remains rooted in that childhood instinct to find value in the discarded. Her practice focuses on ceramics, metal, and concrete, yet these materials act as more than mere supplies. Every object she creates functions as a direct comment on environmental or social issues, a focus she has dedicated her life to pursuing.

Her work often centres on a specific kind of recognition. When Beth sculpts buffalo or birds, she does so to frame animals as equal players in the world. Her concrete figures take this a step further by focusing on human relations and social issues that she feels many people have forgotten. There is a certain weight to these pieces, both literally and figuratively. Concrete is a stubborn medium that requires a different approach than the one used for sidewalks or foundations. Beth does not mix it to be poured. Instead, she mixes the material until it behaves like clay. It is a heavy, wet substance that resists the artist’s hand more than traditional clay does.

To manage this weight, she relies on a secret structural method. She starts with a rebar armature for strength, welding the metal into a skeleton before coating it in chicken wire. She then stuffs the hollow form with waste plastics or whatever scrap materials she has on hand. This hidden core of modern trash provides the volume needed to apply the concrete in layer after layer. She describes her process as one that lacks precision, but that is a deliberate choice. Unlike wood, which demands exactness, concrete and metal allow her to let the form dictate itself. She knows the direction she wants to take, but she refuses to force the material to be a certain way.

While concrete allows for figurative exploration, metal remains her first love. Her approach to metalwork is strictly focused on recycling. She has no interest in visiting a professional shop to buy clean, new sheets of steel. Instead, she wants her audience to look at a sculpture and recognize the history of its components. She loves it when a viewer can point to a piece and identify something like a rusted car wheel. To her, this recognition is vital because it removes the intellectual barrier that often exists between a person and a piece of art.

Many people walk into an art gallery and feel an immediate sense of confusion, asking themselves how a piece was made or why it exists. Beth finds that this creates a wall. By using familiar materials like concrete and old wheels, she ensures that the viewer can engage with the work immediately. They see the rusted metal and the rough stone, and the barrier vanishes. Even her ceramic work follows this logic. She primarily makes bowls and tiles because they offer a clearer image for the viewer. Her tiles function like paintings, providing a narrative on a wall that feels accessible and familiar.

There is a quiet satisfaction for Beth when her work leaves the gallery. She loves the idea of someone understanding or simply liking a piece enough to bring it into their own home. When a sculpture moves from her studio to a domestic space, she feels a sense of success. It means her message about environmental equality or social connection has found a place to rest. For an artist who started by bringing street trash into her childhood home, there is a poetic symmetry in watching her finished works find homes of their own.