Washburn is best known for producing large-scale installations: assemblages of garbage, detritus, cardboard, scrap wood, and, more recently, organic matter such as sod or plants.
The pieces tend to look organic, mirroring the processes, but also have that haphazard, precarious appeal as they are often stacked up with chairs or other props.
Washburn dubs this 'spontaneous architecture' and continues by adding: "My sculptures depend a lot on the spaces where they are shown because they often are anchored into the wall but chance is definitely more of a factor in the final product than is any predetermined design.
A sample installation, Vacational Trappings and Wildlife Worries (exhibited during the summer of 2007 at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art) involved the creation of a "barrel-vaulted walkway made from hundreds of scrap-wood pieces" featuring several niches containing water, shrimp, snails, aquatic plants, and small objects, yielding what Washburn called a 'poor man's aquarium'.
[2] An earlier work, Heavy Has Debt, (exhibited in 2003 in Grinnell, Iowa), was a "massive, shingled wall of debris," produced largely from mounted cardboard.