@natw0od
42 Drawings, 2024. Pastel and charcoal on newsprint, 168 x 96 in.
Undertow, 2025. Abaca pulp, acrylic, concrete, and shells on mesh, 12.5 x 16 in.
In the palm of your hand, 2025. Paper pulp, acrylic, and gouache on mesh, 24 x 24 in.
When do you feel grounded in your body?
There is a subtle and complex relationship between the self and the
natural world, which brings into question the boundary between
where we end and our environment begins. Touch, trust, imperfection,
contradiction, and time can be explored through this delicate
relationship.
Drawing is a way to make sense of sensation. Here what is made is
what is felt. In sitting with a form and tracing its contours, I begin to
understand my own form. These moments are fixed in time and s
pace and yet, inconclusive. To translate is not to decipher and to
feel is not to know.
A line is research: a visual question of separation and unity, and a
reestablishment of bonds broken. Color is a matter of time, rooted
in memories of stretched coastlines, distant deserts, rural oases,
hanging cliffsides. Tactility is intuitive and honest, but not truthful.
T he groove of a shell mimics the canyons along my coastal home,
which mimic the bump of a pelvic bone. Paper pulp is both an
implication and extension of the body; it is skin, skeleton, and shell.
A fresh substance that supports, binds, sticks, constructs, cracks,
and breathes. It lives, and it urges us to live too.
I feel grounded when standing on two feet, and sometimes, when
balancing on one.