Kathryn Bird is a disabled artist making art, rituals and communities on Gadigal land. Kathryn is primarily a paper-and-glue collage artist with a deep interest in community dynamics and formation, as well as the role that archives and collections play in the lives of communities. 

Kathryn founded The Social Glue of Sydney as a leaderless model of communal collage making. This inclusive, no-cost collage group provides an accessible environment for exploring the collage medium.

As a member of The Collage Club, Kathryn contributes to a weekly online project alongside 40 international collage artists. 

Recently, Kathryn completed Tidal Boundaries, a series of environmentally responsive actions, as part of a residency at Woollahra Gallery with Little Umbrella, a collective of disabled artists.  A triptych of works from Tidal Boundaries features in the 2025 Process.ed show, and the collage cycle Impossible Geometries was in the 2024 Manipulated show, both at Articulate Project Space. 

In April and May 2025, she undertook a residency at Bundanon, exploring intersections between personal and ecological grief through the presence of the Powerful Owl and extending her practice through the media of textile, ritual, performance and walking as art. 

Kathryn's background is in creating large-scale multimedia and immersive installation work, but her diagnosis with a neurological disability necessitated a change of scale and scope, with paper-and-glue collage emerging as her chosen medium.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, featuring in curated exhibitions in Belgium, Scotland, the United States, and Australia. 

In 2023, Kathryn collaborated with A Published Event and her husband, the writer and artist Ross Gibson, on a memorial project to allow for private but collective mourning in advance of Ross's immanent death. That work, "14 breaths", is a boxed mourning kit containing poetry, incense and scupltural elements. Kathryn previously worked with A Published Event as a "Reader-in-Residence" for The People's Library of Tasmania (2018), a pioneering publishing-as-art initiative.

Embracing her identity as a disabled artist, Kathryn's unique perspective enriches her work, fostering connections that consider physical and cognitive capacity.