Biography: Natasha Faye Jensen is an interdisciplinary artist from Moh’kins’tsis/Calgary, Treaty 7 territory in the Southern Alberta region, Canada. Jensen completed her BFA at Alberta University of the Arts (formerly Alberta College of Art and Design) in 2013 and currently resides in Edinburgh, Scotland while they complete a MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Edinburgh College of Art. Natasha has exhibited in online exhibitions, galleries, and festivals in Canada and the UK.
Artist Statement: In my current research and studio practice, I am examining the garden as an active site of power. Through historical archives and the history of classification, we are able to unearth the colonial and ecological issues found within, to draw attention to an ideological struggle that is taking place in these seemingly passive spaces. The garden is both a natural and unnatural space when we consider the amount of human intervention and cultivation that takes place within.
I am working through these ideas by exploring a variety of mediums such as collage, photography, and film, all of which represent these themes in their own unique way. For example, cutting and collaging is an act of violence that removes the subject from its context; an implied trauma on the paper that is irreversible. This exploration will reveal these garden spaces for more than their aesthetic beauty, examining their history as a catalyst to talk about social and political change towards climate crisis, decolonization and gender equality.
Animation is a great source of inspiration in my films as it is an accumulation of many images, much like an archive, but with the added illusion of movement and transformation. I intend to experiment with traditional animation in my upcoming films while I conduct my research into decolonizing plant archives and collections.