“For this exhibition I was drawing on a lot of work I produced during lockdown, themes of nature, the body’s health, isolation, and quiet but
unsettling imagery was recurring in my drawing practice. Because this exhibition gave me an opportunity to create work on a scale and in forms I don’t usually have access to, I think it was useful in exploring that, things created alone and isolated become wearable and public. Drawings which are laborious but limited in scale become larger, bright, colourful, more vivid and reproducible. Things which were internal become externalised and shared – to some extent at least.”
Nat Walpole is a Glasgow based artist, working primarily in painting, drawing, and comics. Her work explores themes of gender, sexuality, and the body as a political site.
Whilst she is a trans woman, she identified as non-binary when she undertook this project, and explored this identity in her work both narratively and through playing with the grotesque, bodily, and monstrous, contrasted with visually rich textures, and delicate line work within her drawings.
Nat’s work also involves multimedia narrative projects, in which a wide range of painting, comics, and drawings which all connect to the same narrative throughline. Positioning the themes and imagery within a political, social, and cultural context.
The visual influences in her work range from medieval iconography, modernist painting, manga, comics, and pulp novels.
She has produced work for Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art and KFC, has facilitated workshops for East London Comics Art Fair, and taken part in House for an Art Lover’s Studio Pavilion residency program.
Her website is natwalpole.co.uk