This week, we talked with Houston-based artist Natasha Bowdoin.

Natasha grew up in coastal Maine, and love of the rhythms and patterns of nature courses through her work. But she is also inspired by the texts of surrealist and magical realist writers. She explores the idea of taking what is familiar, altering it in her work just enough to distance the viewer from it, and using the resulting ambiguity to open minds to new ways of looking.

We were lucky to get to talk with Natasha as she was in the process of making a large-scale installation that now fully occupies the largest gallery at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond and is on view now.