Natalie Majaba Waldburger’s current art practice is open-disciplinary and seeks to understand the complexities of respectful collaboration and participatory work in the context of anti-colonial research. In recent years, institutional critique has become the focus for collaborative art practices as a co-founding member of The Drawing Board. As a faculty member at OCAD U, Natalie teaches in the faculty of Artin the Life Studies specialization. Life Studies is a specialization positioned in the Faculty of Art that brings together the arts, sciences, and humanities to cultivate interdisciplinary studio art practices. These pedagogical approaches speak to Natalie’s own art research practice positioned at the intersection of sustainability, social justice, and ecologically-respectful art practices.
In Natalie's most recent work at the bio-art residency at SVA NY Natalie considers living material through an anthropomorphic lens. Working with mycelium and mushrooms, Natalie considers how the distribution of spores converges with human narratives of movement and migration. This biologically-informed comparison evokes “invasion” nomenclatures used to describe waves of immigration, the historical strategies of colonization through cultural appropriation and erasure, and the injection of cultural specificity to domestic spaces and familial relationships. The resilience of spores and their hidden proliferation in the ecologies of domestic spaces evoke the haunted presence of cultural longing and displacement caused by the diasporic experience.
Natalie Majaba Waldburger‘s past figurative paintings present the duplicated individual and explore notions of doubling, delusion, gender ambiguity and identity. These themes reappear in her ongoing text based series; where she buries clinical definitions from the Diagnostic Manual for Psychiatry under a multilayered wax surface. She carefully and partially exposes buried excerpts from the DSM, which create a kind of hidden diagnoses, through methods of peeling and excavation into the waxy surface. The selection of text that is exposed obscures the meaning of the clinical disorder and renders the original definitions unclear, illegible and incongruous. Natalie’s recent work developed out of the Bio Art residency at School of Visual Art, NYC and her collaborative work with the Drawing Board collective. In the resulting installation and performance work she explores the interdisciplinary connections between scientific and social systems and creativity.