Natasha Botelho Cook is a London-based artist investigating what it costs to constantly adjust to environments not made for you.
American/Brazilian, living in the UK, she works between Salvador, California, and London without fully belonging to any. Her practice uses Atlantic conditions (pressure, salt, erosion, time) to test what happens to materials forced to adapt. Rope stretches. Canvas tears. Nets bind together. Salt accumulates. These responses aren't metaphors. They're data.
She's interested in the physical cost of perpetual self-monitoring. The work of fitting in when you don't quite fit. The strain of holding together what wants to fragment. Whether constant adjustment is sustainable or whether it builds up as damage over time. The Atlantic isn't her subject but her laboratory, a system with measurable forces (tidal cycles, salinity levels, shipping routes, undersea cables) that make invisible pressures visible.
Her installations are precarious. Skeletal structures made from maritime materials (rope, netting, canvas, salt residue) that barely hold themselves up. They show adaptation, resistance, transformation, and failure as physical conditions. This is material research into what bodies can actually sustain.
Currently completing an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL), Natasha holds a first-class BA from Central Saint Martins. She won the UK category of the 2023 M&C Saatchi and Saatchi Gallery Art For Change Prize, received the Phoebe Llewelyn Smith Fine Art Award, and has been nominated for the Cass Art Prize and MullenLowe Nova Award.
American/Brazilian, living in the UK, she works between Salvador, California, and London without fully belonging to any. Her practice uses Atlantic conditions (pressure, salt, erosion, time) to test what happens to materials forced to adapt. Rope stretches. Canvas tears. Nets bind together. Salt accumulates. These responses aren't metaphors. They're data.
She's interested in the physical cost of perpetual self-monitoring. The work of fitting in when you don't quite fit. The strain of holding together what wants to fragment. Whether constant adjustment is sustainable or whether it builds up as damage over time. The Atlantic isn't her subject but her laboratory, a system with measurable forces (tidal cycles, salinity levels, shipping routes, undersea cables) that make invisible pressures visible.
Her installations are precarious. Skeletal structures made from maritime materials (rope, netting, canvas, salt residue) that barely hold themselves up. They show adaptation, resistance, transformation, and failure as physical conditions. This is material research into what bodies can actually sustain.
Currently completing an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL), Natasha holds a first-class BA from Central Saint Martins. She won the UK category of the 2023 M&C Saatchi and Saatchi Gallery Art For Change Prize, received the Phoebe Llewelyn Smith Fine Art Award, and has been nominated for the Cass Art Prize and MullenLowe Nova Award.
