The Witness Painting

Natasha Nord was born in a large industrial city Magnitogorsk, USSR. Developing a strong passion for the arts, she took great interest in music, photography and drawing at a young age, playing piano by the age of seven and winning her city’s photography awards by the age of ten. Natasha’s school graduation coincided with the chaos of the Soviet State’s collapse and despite her artistic nature, she applied to the Moscow State University to pursue economics. After having her first child, with her husbands support, Natasha gave up banking and solely devoted herself to a personal journey as an artist focusing primarily on photographic practice. One of her exhibited works during that period was a series of photographs of an abandoned building in Baku, Azerbaijan, called “Within the time space”, exploring the accuracy of human memory and judgment. The series was widely exhibited worldwide including several state museums in Saint Petersburg and galleries in London and Miami. After moving to London in 2007 Natasha studied painting at the Heatherley School of Fine Art and Florence Academy of Art. Since then, photography and painting go hand in hand for her, with one complimenting the other. She uses her photographs and a vast array of collected images as a source of inspiration. As someone who has moved to live in country in which the language is different form her mother tongue; ideas of identity, whether social, sexual, religious or of gender, are extremely important to Natasha. In her work she consistently explore the nuanced characteristics that determine our personal and social identity, questioning stereotypes and conventions. She always looks for new and unique ways of presenting feminism and femininity using her own experience, encouraging a more volatile view of gender than of traditional ideology. In her paintings Natasha wants to turn depiction of women and female forms from being a surveyed object into something that is more powerful and create a foundation where feelings and emotions can be established.