Natasha Bowdoin: Mini Maneater

Artist Natasha Bowdoin created 35 limited-edition centerpieces for our 2018 NYC benefit, and they are now on sale here. Her Mini Maneaters are seedlings from her large-scale installation currently featured in MASS MoCA's Hunter Hallway gallery. Inspired by the Victorian tradition of "the language of flowers," a practice that imbued botanical arrangements with encrypted messages, these mini-blooms evoke a world in which language and nature are yet again intertwined and potentially out to get us if we aren't careful.

Known for her collage-based work and large-scale installations, Bowdoin's work investigates the potential intersections of the visual and the literary, treating language and nature as a kind of phenomena, while re-imagining our relationship to the natural world. Drawing directly from patterns found in nature, or other artists' renditions of it, Bowdoin marries a diversity of sources, from 19th-century botanical illustrations, lunar surface maps, 1800s prints of underwater sea life, and floral textile patterns, to found texts that examine our place in nature.

Acrylic on wood. Dimensions and color vary and you may not receive one that is precisely as pictured.