Natalie Niblack

Natalie Niblack was born into a military family, which meant moving every 3 years. She didn’t call any place home until landing in Northwest Washington in 1979, where she has been ever since. Belonging and stewardship for what we call “home” has increasingly informed her work since moving from Seattle to rural Skagit Valley in 2000. She lives next to Skagit River, where she can observe the pressures of conflicting demands on a fragile landscape, and her work has come to reflect accelerated change in our culture- change in the climate, environment, politics, and social justice. She asks the viewer to recognize the consequences of our relationship with the environment, and the choices we have collectively made that are inevitably altering the world around us. Her most recent work focuses on threats to bird species, near extinctions, and specie recovery in large projects painted in oil on linen. While her first love is painting, she also creates political and social satires in ceramics, and even more birds in glass and relief printmaking. She is committed to exhibiting work in rural public spaces where challenging work in rarely seen, especially in the Pacific Northwest. She feels it is important to bring the conversation about climate to as many places as possible. Niblack taught visual art at Shoreline Community College from 1996 to 2016. She received an MFA from Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland in 1993, and has shown her work in solo and group shows internationally, nationally and regionally.