The author Rachel Carson once wrote, “In nature nothing exists alone.”
Natasha Bowdoin’s Spring Song is an immersive response to the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts’ new building and surrounding landscape.
The vibrant colors and heavy outlines of this floral arrangement echo the inspiration Bowdoin found growing up in a small town in Maine.
“My family members are all fishermen or stonemasons. They learned an intimate understanding of nature, its beauty and its threat, pretty early,” she said.
Bowdoin also connected to nature at an early age wandering through the woods and along the coast.
Her work marries these experiences with influences from nineteenth-century botanical drawings and children’s book illustrations, floral textile patterns, comic book and cartoons, stage sets, and even early science fiction.
This wide range of sources inspired her to create gouache and ink drawings on paper, which eventually lead to large-scale relief sculptures featuring layers upon layers of floral patterns.
These dramatically rendered, heavily stylized plants are playful, but they also comment on humanity’s tenuous relationship to nature.
“It’s a […] positive way to think about human insignificance in relation to nature,” says Bowdoin. “The scale is meant to overpower the viewer, reorienting them to my natural world.”
