About This Blog
My practice has always involved weaving my everyday life into my work. When I had babies, that took the form of a research interest in literature and other media about motherhood. This blog is one of the outcomes of that investigation.
As they grew older, and we were able to explore the world together, I took a deep dive into approaches to education. While living abroad, we had several periods of home education where my ideas met reality as I tried to navigate new environments together with my family. During that season the composing of our lives became a practice in and of itself, but I also published several personal essays and articles on the subject too.
Now that I find myself the caretaker of 8 acres of land, I feel called to integrate what I’m learning about the land I inhabit with previous creative threads. Together, these ongoing investigations make a tapestry of my research interests and creative experiments that continue to surprise and delight me.
I’m excited to discover how this period of place-based investigations deepens and contextualises the cultural events and exhibitions on ecological themes that I organised as a London-based Independent Curator early in my career. And I’m curious to explore how the cyclical nature of motherhood and housekeeping may — or may not — mirror the cyclical qualities of the natural world.
About Natasha
Natasha Rivett-Carnac is an American writer based in Devon, UK. Her personal essays focus on the intersection of art and motherhood. She is published in Resurgence magazine; International Journal of the Arts in Society; The University of Edinburgh’s Dangerous Women Project, an initiative of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities; Goldsmith University’s Women’s Art Library, and elsewhere.
Natasha holds a Masters of Arts in Arts and Cultural Management from Dartington College of Arts (UK) and, designed her own Bachelors degree in Interdisciplinary Art: Visual Art, Creative Writing, and Violin Performance at The University of Minnesota (USA).
Her first career was as a violinist in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she began performing professionally from sixteen. When she retired from performance she worked as an Independent Curator in London with a focus on performance art projects about climate change, including being on the team of C Words: Carbon, Climate, Capital, Culture, a retrospective of Platform that showcased over 80 events at one of Europe’s leading contemporary art centres, Arnolfini. She has also been Curator of Narratives at Outrage and Optimism, a podcast in partnership with Global Optimism.
She is currently Curator of Arts & Ecology at Dartington Trust. In her spare time Natasha is an amateur maker with a passion for letterpress and bookmaking.