Cathy Wysocki makes work that insists on the dignity of small gestures in a disordered world. Working across painting, sculpture, and works on paper, she builds dense, layered surfaces from materials that carry weight both physical and symbolic — sand, glitter, beads, ashes, doll parts, collage, and found objects embedded in acrylic. The resulting objects resist easy categorization: they are devotional without being religious, political without being didactic, tender without sentimentality. Wysocki's practice is rooted in a sustained inquiry into how consciousness navigates its environment — how the individual self orients, stumbles, endures, and occasionally transcends within systems that are frequently hostile to human flourishing. Her titles, often aphoristic and direct, function less as labels than as instructions or invocations: Surmount, Transcend, Transform; No More Torpor; Rally — There Is No Other Way; When the light of your eyes falls to the ground. These are not descriptions of images. They are the images — linguistic forms that carry the same charge as the physical works themselves. The materiality of the work is inseparable from its meaning. Sand and ashes introduce entropy and time; glitter and beads introduce light, the ornamental, the refusal of austerity; collaged fragments of the everyday world surface and recede beneath paint. In recent years, Wysocki has worked on unstretched canvas, recycled linen bags, and cardboard support structures that bear the marks of prior use, as if the work is not beginning on a blank surface but continuing a conversation already underway. One of her most quietly radical gestures is the incorporation of ashes: literal residue, the material fact of loss, held within the same surface as glitter's insistence on shimmer and persistence. Her most recent body of work, The Means Appropriate to a Small Mouse, takes its title from a Buddhist framework for right action — the idea that the tools and scale of one's response should be fitted to what one actually is, rather than to some imagined capacity for heroism. It is a sustained meditation on attentiveness, compassion, and the ethics of daily life during a time of accumulated crisis. The series includes paintings made partly with the ashes of the artist's late partner, Wayne Hopkins — works that are simultaneously elegies and acts of continuation, grief metabolized into material. Wysocki's earlier bodies of work demonstrate the consistency and ambition of a practice that has been quietly building for over four decades. The Lumplanders series introduced invented creatures and ecosystems governed by their own absurdist internal logic — a kind of parallel zoology in which strangeness and vulnerability coexist. Suffer a Sea Changedrew on Shakespeare's The Tempest as a framework for thinking about transformation, loss, and the metamorphic possibilities of catastrophe. Devices for Daily Life and Alleviators approached the body and its psychic management with a dark wit that owes debts to both Surrealism and American vernacular culture. Across all of these series, the work refuses to settle. It moves between registers — humor and grief, the monumental and the tiny, the found and the made — without resolving the tension between them. Originally from the Midwest, Wysocki studied at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles and San Francisco State University before spending twenty-four years living, working, and exhibiting in the Boston area. In 2003, she relocated to New Mexico, and in 2010 to western Massachusetts, where she continues to work. Her exhibitions have spanned institutions including the Berkshire Museum, the Cape Cod Museum of Art, ArtsWorcester, the El Paso Museum of Art, and the Harwood Museum of Art. She has been reviewed in the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, Art New England, and the Albuquerque Journal, among other publications. In 2025, Wysocki presented It has always been the mind at LABspace in Hillsdale, New York. She continues to produce work of uncommon formal intelligence and ethical urgency — painting as if it matters, because, for Wysocki, it does. Cathy Wysocki lives and works in Greenfield, Massachusetts.