©Natalie Collette Wood, Uptown Garden, 2025 Inkjet image transfer and gesso on canvas 72 in x 120 in

Natalie Collette Wood’s recent work Nesting is a multi-faceted commentary on how humans interact with the natural botanical environment that exists on the fringes of urban life. This large-scale installation includes outsized two-dimensional botanical images, a three dimensional sculptural arrangement of furniture and other objects covered in moss, and botanical nests suspended from the ceiling.

In Nesting’s two-dimensional work, she uses the photographic process of image transfer to create vivid layered botanical imagery that is super-contemporary in scale and color, and yet also historical, with weathered seams, color bleeds, and torn overlapping edges.
Wood also uses gesso and paint among and between the layers of image transfers to create “a sense of accumulation, weathering, and instability.”

Wood says she is “drawn to plants that have a strong physical presence, particularly mosses, grasses, vines, succulents, and flowers that trail, spread, or seem capable of overtaking a structure.”

The interplay of man-made and natural environments is a central theme in her work, and the image transfer pieces reflect this: some look like layers of super-saturated wallpaper peeling off the exterior wall of a building, the most sumptuous kind of urban decay. Others are more dreamlike photo-collages that speak to the many narratives that can exist in one microenvironment. They are all innovative in their mix of photographic processes with traditional studio art practices.

©Natalie Collette Wood, Midnight Nesting, 2025 Inkjet image transfer and gesso on canvas 72 in x 120 in

Natalie Collette Wood is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City whose work explores the intersections of nature, memory, and the built environment. Working across sculpture, installation, painting, and collage, Wood combines living and organic materials including moss, native plants, flowers, and vines with found objects, textiles, and photographic imagery to create layered environments shaped by cycles of growth, decay, and renewal. Drawing from materials and ecologies encountered in her Bronx surroundings, her practice considers how natural systems inhabit, transform, and reclaim domestic and architectural space.

Recent highlights include the solo exhibition Nesting at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum and projects presented at Wave Hill, the New York Botanical Garden, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Andrew Freedman Home. Wood is a 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow and a 2025–26 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program resident. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue Italia, and FLAUNT.

©Natalie Collette Wood, Melodies In the Air, 2025 Inkjet image transfer and gesso on canvas 72 in x 120 in

My work explores the shifting relationship between the built environment and the natural world, creating spaces where domestic objects, architecture, and landscape begin to merge. Working across sculpture, installation, image transfer, and collage, I am interested in what happens when familiar structures are altered by growth, weathering, accumulation, and time. Chairs, beds, tables, walls, and other forms associated with shelter and everyday life become sites of transformation, part object, part landscape.

I work with living and natural materials including plants, moss, grasses, coconut matting, vines, and driftwood alongside textiles, wire, found objects, photographic imagery, and painted surfaces. Materials are layered, wrapped, transferred, cultivated, and allowed to shift over time. Rather than presenting nature as separate from the urban environment, my work looks at the ways the two are already entangled: plants pushing against architecture, domestic spaces becoming ecosystems, and human-made structures moving through their own cycles of growth, decay, repair, and renewal.

Domestic space has become increasingly important within my practice. As a mother, I think about the home as a place of care and protection, but also vulnerability, repetition, memory, and constant change. I am drawn to objects that support the body—chairs, beds, nests—and to the possibility of transforming them into spaces that feel simultaneously intimate and unfamiliar. – Natalie Collette Wood

©Natalie Collette Wood, The Nest on Swing Street, 2025 Inkjet image transfer and gesso on canvas 60 in x 72 in

©Natalie Collette Wood, Soft Ending, 2025 Inkjet image transfer and gesso on canvas 68 in x 78 in

©Natalie Collette Wood, Sunset Imprint, 2025 Inkjet image transfer and gesso on canvas 68 in x 78 in

©Natalie Collette Wood, Summer Blom, 2025 Inkjet image transfer and gesso on canvas 36 in x 48 in

©Natalie Collette Wood, The Garden Fossils, 2025 Inkjet image transfer and gesso on canvas 72 in x 60 in

©Natalie Collette Wood, Bloom, 2025 Inkjet image transfer and gesso on canvas 48 in x 36 in

©Natalie Collette Wood, Flower Gel, 2025 Inkjet image transfer and gesso on canvas 38 in x 48 in

©Natalie Collette Wood, Afterlight, 2025 Inkjet image transfer 11 in x 16 in

©Natalie Collette Wood, Violet Web, 2025 Inkjet image transfer 11 in x 16 in

©Natalie Collette Wood, Summer Bloom II, 2025 Inkjet image transfer 9 in x 12 in

©Natalie Collette Wood, Breath, 2025 Inkjet image transfer 22 in x 26 in

©Natalie Collette Wood, Hard Light, 2025 Inkjet image transfer 11 in x 16 in

©Natalie Collette Wood, NESTING, Installation at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, 2025

©Natalie Collette Wood, NESTING, Installation at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, 2025