Natasha Wein

Stockbridge, MA

“Art is something I return to again and again- because it works.”

Natasha is an artist whose work is shaped by adaptation, persistence, and a commitment to honesty. She lives with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), craniocervical instability, a tethered spinal cord, and a traumatic brain injury. After being hit by a car in 2024, her mobility and neurological symptoms changed significantly, and so did her process. She now paints with her feet, often upright in a neck brace, using custom slip-on tools to create different textures and marks. “I don’t make art because I want to, I make it because I have to.”

Her work is grounded in abstraction and informed by psychoanalysis, both as a field of study and through her own experience in therapy. She uses painting as a way to work through memory, conflict, and emotion, often focusing on things that are difficult to articulate directly. “I’m more interested in what is honest than what is easy to look at,” she explains.

Natasha has been making things for as long as she can remember. As a child, she cooked, sewed, and crafted regularly, and she later worked in a communal studio where she was introduced to abstract painting. Before her injuries, she was also a competitive soccer player on a nationally ranked team. Over time, her creative practice expanded to include working with natural materials. She collects and processes bones from roadkill, cleaning and preserving them over months before incorporating them into her work. The process has influenced how she thinks about the body and mortality. “It made me see death differently- not as something separate, but as part of the same system.”

Her work often deals with grief, injury, connection, and resilience. While the subject matter comes from her own life, the themes tend to resonate more broadly. “The more specific I am, the more people seem to find themselves in it,” she notes.

Outside of her studio practice, Natasha is engaged with a range of social issues, including disability rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, Indigenous rights, and environmental concerns. She places a high value on human creativity, direct connection, and time spent in nature.

Her approach to art is not fixed. She works in series, allowing her style and focus to shift over time depending on what she is working through. Much of her recent work explores the tension between grief and joy. “I’m trying to figure out how both can exist at the same time.”

For Natasha, art is a way to process experience and move forward. It gives her a structure for understanding what has happened and a way to imagine what comes next.