Natalie Majaba Waldburger

Colony Installation at SVA New York My recent body of artwork speaks to the generative and complex experiences of being a an artist, teacher, and collaborator. Through an engagement with materials that grow themselves, are shaped by their surrounding environments, and rely on care for their formation, I pursue methodologies of relational practices in my work and collaborations. These performative, transient and ephemeral approaches are appear in several aspects of my art practice; installation work that is biodegradable and transient, time-based participatory performance and creative collaborations with the Drawing Board. In my installation work I seeks out those materials that, once the conditions of life are provided, will thrive on their own alongside practices of care. This work provides a metaphor, both material and experiential, that questions the imperative of the archival in artmaking while asking the viewer to appreciate the ephemeral and fleeting qualities of affect. It proposes the possibilities of an artwork’s lifespan, calling attention to the cycles of life and death. Similarly, participatory practices that engage the public bring together people in conversation and in play for a finite amount of time speak to collective experiences. It is this kind of playfulness and joy that frames my collaborative work with The Drawing Board, as mothers, artists, and teachers we thrive in those spaces of collective making. These approaches speak to my experiences as a mother and are central to my teaching philosophies. In the series Colony, Victorian ceiling medallions are cast out of mycelium, the root system of fungus. Reacting with oxygen, the network of filaments expand into these moulds to take the forms of these ornate architectural embellishments made uncanny by the resulting soft suede-like and mottled surfaces. The imperfections and variations are simultaneously tactile and organic. Mycelium growth responds to ambient conditions during its ten-day growth cycle and varies from species to species. Temperature, light, bacteria, and other factors alter the bodies of this material resulting it a variety of differences in color, texture, and density. Mushrooms are part of the fungi kindom alongside other sporogenic organisms like yeast and mould, which reproduce through spores. Spores act as a metaphor in my work to describe airborne organisms generally that proliferate, reproduce, and colonize spaces, through invisible air-borne pathways often in darkness. In this way, mycelium shares its story of movement and and thriving with other species in narratives of survival. Through an anthropomorphic lens, 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. By allowing materials like mycelium and wheatgrass to grow on their own the processes are left up to the organisms’ capacities for growth. In the case of this most recent body of work, Natalie selected mycelium as a material for its physical characteristics but also because of the very nature of mycelium as a living being. Mushrooms are more animal than plant in the world. The material held a significance greater than what I could initially have guessed. My research into mycelial growth patterns led to studies done using in which scientist observed mycelium to in relation to tumour research. Mycelial growth emulates that of tumour growth but with a shorter growth cycle. This characteristic of mycelium growth allows researchers to experiment with the material as a way of predicting the growth patterns of tumours over a longer duration. Tumour growth patterns resonated deeply with me. At the age of nine my son was diagnosed with a brain tumour, undergoing brain surgery, rehabilitation, and a chemotherapy. Over the years, we have monitored the tumour, tracked its growth and changes, a slow and painstaking process filled with setbacks and tribulations along the way. Once I discovered this research connecting tumour research to mycelium I began to experiment with the material in a series of tessellated origami pieces. Fruiting mycelium was seeded in the folds of several curve-folded origami pieces. These pieces were cylindrical and spherical in their overall shape as a reference to both a petri dish and the human brain. Over the course of two weeks the hyphae of the mushroom, the long branching filamentous structures that are the main mode of mycelium growth, spread out in thin and ghost-like lines from the folds of the paper in radiating patterns. These networks act simultaneously as both drawings made by the mycelium and also maps of tumour growth, providing me with a physical, though speculative portrait, of the biological structure of my son’s tumour and how it might be moving through his body. The unsettling beauty in these “drawings” speaks to the tumour’s presence in our lives. Mo These hauntings are passed down through families and Institutional critique, trauma-informed pedagogy, and arts-informed approaches to decolonizing the institution; it is at the intersection of these methodologies that artistic practice can speak to the diasporic experience for art students. The phenomenon of the “cultural orphan” among diasporic communities is often expressed through artwork as a longing for connection to, or an idealized perception of, unknown land and culture. This journey that can reveal traumatic family histories and loss. These embodied artistic experiences generate dialogue about the migrant experience that can trouble the fixed subject of FilipinX in the institution while creating possible models of decolonial futures. This presentation will draw on student work and contemporary art practices to propose pedagogical models in which the expression of cultural narratives acts as critical tool in decolonizing the institution. The Drawing Board is a group of three working artists, educators, and mothers who use drawing and performance collectively to critique institutional systems and their impact on the creative process. Our work derives out of our simultaneous use of these systems as well as a critique of them, both functionally and through the use of actual institutional materials. Our past work was highly collaborative, both as a collective and in our performances. The in-person performative drawings we created were collaborations, in which we “performed” institutional decision-making and applied “rules of governance”, methods derived from our direct experiences of working within these settings. Making visible this process of Adapting our home environments to studio spaces is an important component of the work in that also it highlights the range of hidden labour involved in this process. This confluence of sites represents a fusion of personal and work space and that is reflected in our collaborative drawings. We will be creating a suite of work that represents this scattered experience and resulting dissolution of our lived spaces (both the lived and work spaces. The timeline of two months is loose and open (flexible? adaptable?) as it reflects the asynchronous and ongoing fluid nature of passing work back and forth amidst responds to the timely and the hurried and disrupted panic of the time we live in now. The timeline also reflects the feeling of living in isolation and the collision of social, personal and economic labour. Our work intends to reach out to the experiences of working mothers parents, professional artists and professors institutional workers whose these roles and the spaces in which they work have blurred even further. The new digital and online space represents this the collapse of traditional home and work environments but also as a transformative space. Adapting our home environments to studio spaces is important in that it highlights the range of labour involved in this process. The merging of the work environment into our home environment is a fusion of personal and work space and is reflected in our collaborative drawings. We will be creating a suite of work that represents this experience and dissolution of our lived spaces and scattered experiences.