Natalie Baxter explores concepts of place-identity, nostalgic Americana, and gender stereotypes through sculptures that playfully push controversial issues.
In Backbone, Natalie's work of soft sculpture - bloated flags, large crazy quilts, oversized housecoats, and woven laundry baskets - questions the historic and contemporary definitions of gendered labor in the United States. Baxter asks us why and how (in deceivingly soft fabrics) is the labor statistically placed on American women - namely the efforts of caretaking, cooking, cleaning, and other relative housework - not defined as conventional “hard labor?”
How are these activities not excruciatingly hard yet rewarded by very little, zero, or exponentially negative pay? And more importantly, how are they not, in countless ways, recognized as life-sustaining and deserving in their own right of governmental support, medals, and accolades?
Baxter is currently based in New York. She received her MFA from the University of Kentucky in 2012 and a BA in Fine Art from the University of the South in Sewanee, TN in 2007.
