Artist Statement 
Originally from the East Coast, I'm a photo-based artist and ceramic sculptor working with the desert terrains of the Southwest. These landscapes were once shallow seas — seashells still surface from dry washes, barnacles turn up embedded in sandstone. I grew up near the ocean, in humid, salt-heavy air, surrounded by green. The desert is its inverse: arid, exposed, austere. Yet it teems — light shifts hue by the hour, and the forces that shape the terrain feel primal, held in tension between the sublime and the threatening.

I'm drawn to change measured in millennia, in part because it displaces my own mortality into something larger and less consequential. Recognizing myself as one small element within longer, slower systems loosens my need to control outcomes.

That loosening is central to how I work. Everything tends toward disorder over time — not as failure, but as the basic condition of living systems. I'm interested in processes that work with that tendency rather than against it: desert flora that adapt instead of resisting, a shell calcifying around its own vulnerability, the chemical exchange between land and sky.

My two mediums occupy different points along the axis of control and surrender. In photography, I intervene in the landscape temporarily with thrown fabric, or alter the final image in Photoshop — the composition and the narrative remain mine to shape. In ceramics, I build slab constructions with surfaces textured to echo coral or barnacle formation, finished in glazes and terra sigillata. Clay resists that same authorship; the material asserts its own terms.

I make this work to engage — and to render visible — the beauty inherent in disorder. Entropy is not decline; it's the condition that makes adaptation and renewal possible at all.

Bio
Rebecca Webb received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 1990, and pursued graduate studies in painting at New York University's Steinhardt School, as well as photography and museum studies at Harvard University.

Webb is a photographer and ceramic sculptor whose work has been exhibited widely, including the Oceanside Museum of Art, Joseph Bellows Gallery, Griffin Museum of Photography, The San Diego International Airport, Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, The Cooper Union, and Thomas Kellner Atelier in Siegen, Germany, among others. Her photographs have appeared in numerous print and online publications.

Her honors include two grants from the William Male Foundation, residencies at the High Desert Test Site in Joshua Tree, CA, and the Millay Artists Colony in Austerlitz, NY, a finalist nomination for the 2019 San Diego Orchid Award for her series Hado, a nomination for the 2017 San Diego Art Prize, and a shortlist for the John Chervinsky Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography. Her work is held in private and public collections. This summer (2026) she is embarking on a three year ceramic sculpture residency at the Anderson Ranch in Colorado.

Webb is also a curator and project manager. She provides art consulting services in hospitality and corporate settings.  In 2018, she produced an immersive "24 hour" installation Ama: Into the Deep for Wonderspaces at the Lafayette Hotel in San Diego, California, and curated the exhibition San Diego: The Architecture of Four Ecologies at the La Jolla Historical Society in La Jolla, California. ‘Four Ecologies’ was called one of the “most memorable” exhibitions in San Diego by the San Diego Union Tribune “2018 shows us what San Diego's art scene aspires to be.”  In 2014, Webb launched and curated/produced the Filmatic Festival at UCSD to present immersive experiences at the intersection of science, cinema, and technology, which ran annually until 2016.