Known for her cut paper, collage-based work and her large-scale, immersive installations, Bowdoin investigates the potential intersections of the visual and the literary, channeling the experience of reading into the activity of drawing, while reimagining our relationship to the environment.

Power Flower, found in M.D. Anderson Biology Building, is a celebration of nature. This engaging, wall-sized installation of brightly colored, cut and painted organic forms, calls forth an unruly garden, teeming with life. Abundant with dizzying patterns inspired by florals and vegetation, the painting is interwoven with motifs reminiscent of turtle shells, fish scales, snake skin and moth wings. The result generates a visually lush landscape that appears in flux. Interested in how artists and naturalists have sought to understand, identify, depict, and define the natural world over time, Bowdoin here creates a spacious ecosystem that resists easy containment and immediate identification. Power Flower is a commemoration of the natural world, both real and imagined. It embodies exuberance and intensity while conveying an ecologically-minded message, encouraging viewers to consider their own connections to the landscape around them.

Working with a vocabulary of forms inspired by vintage patio prints and hand-drawn illustrations, Posy 05, is a wall relief Bowdoin created for Wiess House. Its individual leaf and petal elements, together with its placement adjacent to an exterior window, invite a dialogue between real and imagined concepts of nature. The work embodies exuberance and intensity while conveying an ecologically-minded message, encouraging viewers to consider their own connections to the landscape around them.

About the Artist:  Natasha Bowdoin (b. 1981, West Kennebunk, ME) graduated with an MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art in 2007 and obtained a BA in classics and studio art from Brandeis University in 2003. Bowdoin has held a number of artist residencies including at the Core Program, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2008–2010), the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (2013), and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2012). Bowdoin has had numerous gallery and museum exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including the solo exhibitions In the Night Garden at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth (2020–2021), Sideways to the Sun at the Moody Center for the Arts (2019), and Maneater at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA (2018–2020). Bowdoin is an Associate Professor of art at Rice University and lives and works in Houston.