Natasha Zraikat
Natasha Zraikat’s past couple of years have been anything but smooth sailing - her journey has been one of intense emotional upheaval, artistic exploration and profound personal growth.
From the loss of her father to the end of a significant relationship, Natasha has channelled these experiences into building a body of work that speaks of raw vulnerability and transformative healing.
“I have had a particularly challenging year, my father passed away late last year, it just dredges up all kinds of stuff. I’m stunned not by just the grief itself but what it pulls up and out of you. It’s been really overwhelming.”
“The challenge lies in the many layers of it - I’ve been fortunate I haven’t lost a huge amount of people I’m very close to and I’m surprised at how much loss can pull the thread from unearthed feelings from childhood and all this stuff in my life, an ancestral thread that all of a sudden upends everything.”
“I’m processing this damaged, fractured kind of family connection that has been an undercurrent and something I normalised a lot. We didn’t have a relationship where we would argue or come head-to-head, but there were things I would swallow, repress and push to the side, ‘that was hurtful’, ‘that’s just him’. I would push these feelings down and push them to the side, they were there and present - but sitting neatly in a little box.”
Natasha said life’s normal challenges and regular day to day functioning became overwhelming as the all-encompassing processing of these emotions and feelings took precedence and left her with a new hurdle to surmount.
“I suffered chronic fatigue for the first time in my life and you know when you have it - you cannot function for more than two hours without having to lie down and go back to sleep.”
“My body was like, that’s enough. When I looked inwards, the metaphysical causes of things, I did so much reading, and one book that I found really resonated with me, it spoke about this hopelessness of you feel like you have no control, hopeless in something so your body is powering down, a sense of giving up – that really resonated with me at the time.”
“Everyone who was my closest people just went. I was confronted with new people and the whole experience was confronting and terrifying, wonderful and scary.”
Natasha said these very themes were reflected in new works she was painting at the time, which surprisingly were connected to her early teens and the depression she experienced during her formative years.
Beneath, Natasha Zraikat
“I was a fairly well-rounded person mentally most of my life, but when I was a teenager, I was in this deep depression, which is when my journey in art was born, I started drawing a lot as therapy which is how I started to develop my art.”
“At the time my skill level wasn’t the same, but I would paint creatures. I remember my mum looking at my current sea creature painting and said this is you going back to your younger self.”
The painting Natasha is referring to depicts a woman (self-referential) gasping for air above the water, but she is seemingly of the water with a non-humanoid form below the surface.
“She appears to be drowning, but she is of the water but can’t live in the water- being trapped between two worlds, she is created to be under the water, but when she is under, she can’t breathe.”
“That symbolism being stuck between these two worlds. I’m a Pisces, it’s a thing for us to be overwhelmed in our emotions – but it can also be very debilitating sometimes if you don’t hone your ability to be logical and accept physical reality. You get consumed and feel so strongly.”
Natasha is exhibiting with Recovered Futures for the first time and her works in the exhibition explore the interconnectedness of humans and nature and how they interact and work with or against, one another.
“What we see in the world is a reflection and projection of our own lived experience, and this can alter our perception so much. At a deeper level, we are so interconnected, with our living environment, plants, nature, animals – but also with other people – we are made of the same matter and the same energy, it’s not just an impression we have – we have this idea that we can kind of control our world, because the world is us.”
In Introspection the subject had a troubled energy surrounding him at the time which Natasha found intriguing and she describes the process as exploring themes of ‘we are all part of a working whole’ which the subject did not subscribe to.
Natasha stands with her painting Introspection
“He is incredibly intelligent, but emotionally cut off, intellectually so switched on, but when it comes to himself and his own emotions, he hadn’t figured out how to express that at all,” she said.
The Other Now was a continual battle for Natasha to finish and was painted over a course of three years.
“I fought with this painting the entire time, I hated it and nearly painted over it. I wanted to put a knife through the canvas and maybe that energy comes through. I was trying to explore our ability to impact on our world and the bushfires of 2020 were the impetus for the beginning of the painting – the sky looked like a bonfire, and she was initially holding fire in her hand.”
“I wanted to explore the impact we as humans have on our world, be it negative or positive, what direction do we want to take. Her and the raven are looking in the same direction, to connect back to nature, the flow and looking to the future together. The fire in her hand eventually turned into a white glow – embodying energy and power.”
“You end up being the best at the things you struggled with the most – they strengthen you in the best ways because you have been challenged and had to work hard at them.”
The Other Now by Natasha Zraikat
Natasha Zraikat is exhibiting with Recovered Futures for the first time in 2024. Her paintings Introspection and The Other Now will be on display from 4 to 10 October in King George Square.