About Natalie

I live in Queensland, Australia and am largely a self taught artist. I studied Visual Art at QUT but didn’t learn much; even though I’ve been art making for over 15 years, it is creative work that is performed outside the conventional art world.

My drawings are an avenue for meditation and self care. They are largely influenced by my embodiment as a fat woman with mental illness. My early work focused on highly detailed and repetitive line work, and commented on femininity in pop culture as much as my own feelings about my own very unpopular femininity.

As my creative practice matures I seek to illustrate a femininity that moves away from conventional beauty ideals. In recent work I represent femininity through a form that is larger and more featureless, calling upon traditional Venus figurines, Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nanas, and Keith Haring’s figures. Through these I find myself able to play more freely with context and character.

In the history of fine art, the representation of women is a trope of the silent, conventionally beautiful model, so when I move away from that, I’m not beholden to that history. I can actually represent and play with the modern femininity that isn’t male centered.

I’ve sewn since I was a teenager, but in recent years the crisis of fashion over-consumption and textile waste has increasingly weighed on my mind. By bringing my craft skill to my art practice I feel like I can interrogate femininity in art to the fullest of my ability, and using salvaged textiles that have been discarded from the fashion and home sewing industries I can amply make the point that there is an abundance of material in the world.

I’m always thinking about women’s crafts and how they are seen as utilitarian and part of a woman’s job rather than being an avenue for creative expression and art. In domestic spheres, we can admire women’s crafts but it isn’t respected in the context of the art world as art objects. Using feminised skills to create posters, it’s pushing back at what’s modern, what’s considered effective communication, and it centers a non-male voice using a non-male medium.

It brings in the issues of textile waste in fast fashion, consumption, wastefulness and trend cycles.

When it comes to art objects, I want craft skills to be a valid way to express ideas about art and philosophy. When someone looks at a poster, it’s usually advertising something or letting people know something is happening, and that’s kind of what I want it to do: let them know this is what’s happening in the world. What you do with that information is up to you. But there is also a sense of propaganda in it, because it’s persuasive language, and when a woman is telling you to do something, how does it make you feel? Because there’s the trope of the nagging wife or nagging mother, but also there are maternal aspects. It’s interesting to know how people feel about that.