Natasha Burton 


Natasha Burton did a Bachelor's in Textile Design at Central St Martins (SCM) and a Master's of Fine Art in Sculpture from UCL Slade School of Fine Art, where she procured a distinction. She received an Emerging Artist Award from the Sarabande Foundation which was set up by Alexander McQueen.

Her artwork is predominantly informed by African spirituality and mythology and celebrates African and African Diasporic cultures. It explores the effects of slavery, colonialism, imperialism and misogynoir on society. Her identity as an African-Caribbean British woman is at the core of her practice. Her artistic practice is a type of activism that highlights societal issues. Black politics and concerns are an ineffaceable part of her work. Pan-Africanism and Black womanism feed her artistic expression. Natasha champions neurodivergent, disabled and marginalised groups. She uses found items and organic materials. She utilises techniques that are part of a rich African cultural and artistic identity, like bronze-making and ceramics, and she also uses the technique of mould-making .
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The Congo Past and Present: The Legacy of Colonisation and Slavery
Installation by Natasha Burton
Upsitedown trees, soil, clay, rubber, bronze, found organic materials, rope
2025


My current project emerges from an engagement with the Congo’s complex histories of colonial exploitation and their continued reverberations in the present. I began by researching the brutal legacy of King Leopold II, whose regime violently exploited and enslaved the Congolese population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This historical inquiry soon developed into an exploration of contemporary forms of exploitation, particularly the conditions in cobalt and coltan mines, where Congolese workers—often including children—endure unsafe and coercive labour practices. By placing past and present in dialogue, my project seeks to highlight the continuities of structural violence, and to foreground the ways in which global systems of extraction persistently shape the lives of Congolese people.

A central concern of my practice is the translation of historical and political narratives into material and sculptural form. My process has increasingly emphasized the use of organic, site-specific materials to underscore these thematic concerns. This approach drew the attention of the curator Alicja Orzechowska, who was particularly interested in the organic character of the work and its resonance with her curatorial theme of the park. In response, I began to incorporate materials sourced directly from Brunswick Park, where the gallery is located. For example, I used elderberries harvested from the park to dye rope that became integral to my sculptures. The rope operates as both a literal material and a symbolic form: a reminder of bondage, violence, and control, yet also transformed through a natural process into an object of aesthetic and cultural significance.

I further experimented with seeds gathered from the park’s trees, embedding them into “seed feet” sculptures. These forms allude to both protection and rootedness, evoking the interconnection between the human body and the natural environment. The use of seeds underscores questions of growth, continuity, and resilience, while also situating the work within a specific geographic and ecological context. By engaging with materials from the site, my sculptures link the history of distant geographies—the Congo and its legacies of enslavement—with the local environment of Brunswick Park, thereby collapsing distinctions between global and local histories.

As the project developed, I became increasingly attentive to the ideological construction of parks themselves. Parks are typically perceived as spaces of leisure, harmony, and communal gathering, yet this idyllic framing often obscures their connection with histories of violence. In the United States, public parks were at times the sites of racial terror, including lynchings that were witnessed by assembled crowds in settings that appeared, superficially, festive or familial. In Britain, many parks and landscaped estates were established or sustained through wealth derived from the transatlantic slave trade. Thus, the seemingly neutral or pastoral character of these spaces conceals historical layers of dispossession, racial violence, and exploitation.

By foregrounding these contradictions, my work aims to unsettle the pastoral imagery of the park and reveal the darker narratives embedded within it. The incorporation of natural materials—rope, berries, seeds—invites the viewer to reflect on the entanglement of beauty and brutality, growth and destruction, leisure and violence. My sculptures seek to generate a space of critical reflection where the histories of the Congo, the legacies of slavery, and the contemporary uses of public green spaces intersect.

Ultimately, I conceive of my practice as a form of excavation. Through the layering of materials and symbols, I attempt to bring hidden or obscured histories to the surface. By interweaving global histories of colonialism and slavery with the local ecology of Brunswick Park, my work insists on the necessity of confronting the past within the present. In doing so, it seeks to challenge the viewer to reconsider familiar spaces and to recognize the ways in which violence, resilience, and survival remain embedded in our environments.