“Nature is the best teacher,” says sculptor Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh. The artist, who taught herself to carve stone, creates work that references the power, beauty, and contradictions of nature through sensuous biomorphic forms. In more recent work, she has carved polystyrene maquettes and cast them in bronze and aluminum, sometimes adding color with automotive paint. Kavanagh uses her sculptures to draw attention to our precarious relationship with the natural world in series like her “Pteropod” works, which feature shapes inspired by tiny sea creatures endangered by rising sea levels. The pared-down and rounded forms in her work have drawn comparisons to the work of Modernists like Hans Arp, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth.