Natalie Brooks

Natalie Brooks attained a BA(hons) in Fine Art from Hereford College of Arts and has exhibited nationally. She works within the West Midlands area and runs regular needle felting workshops.

Natalie is a multi-practice artist who creates mixed media sculpture and drawing in tandem. Natalie’s work explores the emotional response to her own lived experiences including themes around emotional repression, parental guilt, and postnatal depression. Natalie believes that the physical act of making can help with reflection and healing and time spent making work by hand has been the main ethos to her multi-practice approach.

Animal imagery features heavily within Natalie’s work and her choice of animal is determined by connections with their behaviour or mythology. Natalie regularly uses birds and bees together, as they are symbolic of the idealised parental experience, but she often shows them at odds. Bird murmurations feature in the drawings, they can show the idea of safety within a group, but also the exhausting pressure to keep up with others. Cuckoos (both in birds and bees) appear regularly as a subversion of the maternal expectation. They mimic others to gain access to the maternal role whilst at the same time they are unable to provide.