Natasha Holmes

Natasha Holmes is a visual artist and educator specializing in photography, ceramics, and design. Currently living and teaching in Upstate New York and loving the northeast cold, she is a westcoaster born and raised in southern California. She undertook a year of post-bac in ceramics, and then received her MFA in Photography from Indiana University.

Prior to that, studied for her BFA in both Ceramics and Creative Photography at California State University, Fullerton while also chasing Plan C there, gathering a minor in Anthropology. A craftsperson at heart, she worked in commercial print shops, custom darkrooms, and photojournalism. Attending and working at schools in mixed locations across the US, and abroad in Kyoto and Venice, she practices cultivating curiosity and understanding. Learning has become her trade. Her classes have included University as well as small workshops and Community Ed. In each, she challenges participants to consider phenomena and presence with criticality and to become socially alert. In her work, she blends ephemera with queries of consumption and mass production that mingles with absence and presence. She is enamored with objects and evidence and calls attention to the ubiquity of plastics and the resulting temporary nature of items and the disposability of our era. She focuses on planned obsolescence; fast production, plastics, and other common materials that have made items substandard and expendable. Those cycles ensure the need for more production. Holmes inspects objects, especially technology laden equipment, that is made, wrapped, packaged, and shipped to our hungry little hands faster than ever. And then, just as quickly, these are tossed aside, thrown away, or forgotten, along with their empty packaging, but captured with her lens.