Bio
Natalie Jenkins is a visual artist and exhibition design specialist based in San Francisco, California. With an MFA from the University of California, Riverside (2020) and a BFA from the Oregon College of Art and Craft (2014), Jenkins brings a decade of professional expertise to her multifaceted artistic practice.
As an artist
Her work has been recognized with a Cultivate Grant from Art Council Santa Cruz County in 2021 and an award from the Seattle Art and Culture Commission in 2014. Jenkins has exhibited extensively across the United States, including Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Riverside, and Santa Cruz.
As a designer
She specializes in immersive, thought-provoking experiences. Jenkins combines her scope of fabrication, digital design, art handling, and large-scale installation skills to bring creative visions to life. She collaborates closely with artists, curators, and community groups, overseeing the design, planning, and execution of dynamic exhibitions that engage viewers with precision and impact.
Artist Statement
Working primarily in sculpture, Jenkins explores the mediation of ‘seeing’ through physical obstruction and perceptual confusion. She draws inspiration from a broad palette of architecture, myth, allegory, and domestic custom to explore the abstractions underpinning cultural tradition with the acknowledgment that these structures are the basis of subjective vantage points. Surrealist in their representations, the objects are darkly goofy and prop-like, constructed out of simple materials such as papier-mâché. Visually uniting the work is a thematic grid and/or pattern to suggest a system of order and undefinable space. Each sculpture has an inside/outside quality; one must view the work through external punctures into its interior to piece together the entirety of the composition. Each work involves how vision, memory, and imagination are conflated into an intelligible unified form.