Natalie Lauren is a multi disciplinary artist from Tulsa, Oklahoma who’s work seeks to create a safe space for people to experience multi-sensory healing, reflection and liberation.
My art advocates for the voice of black women like my grandmother and mother. The silence they held for over 50 years until 2017 when we shared a common song, one of trauma, pain and overcoming. I have come to create art and sounds that disrupt the silence, to invite women who dance in its darkness, to find the light buried inside. My images and songs are full in the presence of strength and weakness. This is a multi sensory healing experience. One of mind, body, and soul.
“Art is the one place we all turn to for solace”. Carrie Mae Weems spoke the actualization of my truth. Art has allowed me to sit in solitude and to interrogate the silence that surrounded me. Using the mediums of sound, visual arts, and lyrics I have challenged the silence, the questions waiting to be answered. When the language of sound found me, it demanded every distortion of my true self to flake away. This language acted as the sun, bearing through the epidermis of hardened insecurities that the world often tends to hand us women of color. Through language I was gifted legs to run toward every good thing life has to offer, a voice to sing and dare to undo my own darkness. I also picked up my number 2 pencils to carve my dreams and hopes into existence. Art in all her forms colored me a home that was safe, marked with a triadic color scheme; music, visual arts, and photography. My imagination allowed me to sketch out a fairytale I wanted to live in. As a young girl, I needed a canvas of some sort to live on-somewhere to die quietly and hide my distress until I was brave enough to let my voice spill out. I replaced the bad memories with brighter tinted ones using photography. Art & music became safe spaces to wander through until my voice came, and surely it came as all truth eventually does, arriving to set the captives free. I know there are women who’ve waded in 81 years of silence, women who need my art to rescue them.
“Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.” (Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture, 1993)
Music by nature is a therapeutic agent being the universal language of the world, finding its way around the corridors of culture, unapologetically unifying people with a singular feeling. Not only do we as a nation need the balm of song but we need to be able to move beyond the bias that comes with linguistic systems and explanations into emotion, into the subconscious that sound and imagery creates in the absence of words. Music and Image offers us an entrance into empathy. Empathy that not only seeks to listen but to advocate.