On Material, Memory, and Making Time: A Conversation with Woodcarver Dan Webb

There's something quietly radical about choosing wood as your medium in contemporary art. While much of the art world celebrates de-skilling and conceptual distance, Dan Webb has spent two decades becoming extraordinarily good at an ancient craft—and in doing so, has created work that stops you in your tracks.

Webb, who is represented by Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle and has shown everywhere from the Smithsonian to the Seattle Art Museum, describes himself simply as a woodcarver. Not a sculptor, not an installation artist—a woodcarver. It's a deliberate choice that speaks to discipline over ego, student over master, process over product.

Watch our full interview with Dan.

The Material Matters

Webb's material comes with its own history. Working primarily with salvaged timber from the Pacific Northwest—cast-offs from demolished buildings, remnants of the region's extractive past—he transforms beams and planks into impossibly delicate forms. Hands emerge from raw wood. Mylar balloons rendered in timber seem to float with all their commercial cheapness made monumental and sincere.

"You're working with material that was alive and is no longer," Webb explains. "You're cutting through winter and spring and fall, seeing bug infestations, fungus, fires—the story of this thing's life." When you're carving through 300 years of growth rings, you can't help but think about time differently.

Holding Sharp Things

Time—and what we do with it—runs through Webb's current exhibition at Greg Kucera Gallery, "Yespalier" (a portmanteau of "yes" and "espalier," that French technique of training fruit trees to grow flat against walls). The show grapples with finding agency within structures we didn't create, discovering joy within constraints we can't control.

One piece, "Hold Sharp Things," features a carved hand clutching arrows—modeled from the hands of someone who died a month before the exhibition opened. It's about the skill of holding onto painful memories, the grace required to carry grief. This is what Webb does: he takes gestures—clutching, grasping, offering—and freezes them in material that will outlast us all.

Redeeming the Mylar Balloon

Perhaps no work better exemplifies Webb's approach than "I Love You," a heart-shaped Mylar balloon carved from wood, now in the collection of the Tacoma Art Museum. It takes one of our culture's most disposable, insincere objects—that crinkly Valentine's balloon destined for a landfill—and asks: what if we took this seriously? What if we made it permanent, monumental, beautiful?

"We're all kind of that Mylar balloon," Webb reflects. "Daring ourselves. Could I really be that brave? Could I really mean that? Could I redeem that balloon and step into what it was trying to do?"

The Long Game

Webb's fifth solo exhibition with Greg Kucera Gallery represents something increasingly rare: a sustained, decades-long relationship between artist and gallery. In an art world often chasing the next hot thing, Webb and his gallery have built something deeper—a platform for conversation that has grown and deepened over time.

"There's no shortcut to being an artist," Webb says. "It's a lot of work, deep diving into yourself to do this. Having somebody believe in your process is an invaluable gift."

His work proves that contemporary art doesn't have to choose between technical mastery and conceptual depth, between beauty and meaning. Sometimes the hobo whittling on the porch and the European academic carver can meet—and when they do, they might just make something impossible: hands that seem to breathe, balloons that say "I love you" and actually mean it, moments of grace carved from trees older than countries.

"Yespalier" is on view at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle through February 21, 2026. If you can't make it in person, do yourself a favor: pause, look up his work online, and prepare to be astonished.