Today we’d like to introduce you to Natacha Sochat.
Natacha, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My story has never followed a straight line. Looking back, however, I can see that what once appeared to be separate directions were always interconnected.
I was born in New York City to a Puerto Rican mother and Cuban father, but when I was four months old, I was flown to La Habana, Cuba, where I was raised by my paternal grandmother and uncle. My father was a Cuban revolutionary and this had a huge impact on how I perceive the world. It impacted my sense of economic fairness and social justice. It impacted my being able to see that what one experiences may be distorted by its presentation in history and media outlets. It paved the way for my becoming a critical thinker.
I returned to New York and I grew up first in Manhattan and later in the South Bronx, where I was fortunate to attend the Bronx High School of Science. From the beginning, my life involved movement between places, cultures, languages, and different ways of understanding where one belongs. Much later, I would recognize how deeply those early experiences informed my work as an artist. I drew from childhood, but I did not initially imagine that art would become the organizing force of my life.
Before my undergraduate years, my life took me to Berlin, Germany before the Berlin Wall had been taken down. Living in Berlin placed me within a different cultural and linguistic environment, but this time I was an adult, able to observe that difference consciously. Berlin sharpened my awareness of how history remains embedded in place, how identity changes depending on context, and how being both inside and outside a culture can alter perception. It reinforced something that had already been part of my experience since childhood: identity is not singular or fixed, but layered, relational, and continually shaped by where we are, who surrounds us, and the histories we carry with us.
Berlin also gave another dimension to questions of displacement and belonging that would later surface throughout my work: Where do we belong? What do we carry from one place into another? How do language, memory, geography, and history alter the ways we see ourselves and others?
I eventually moved to Boston, where my fascination with the natural world led me to study biology at Boston University. There, evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis became my mentor. Her understanding of life as fundamentally interconnected, and of evolution as shaped not only by competition but also by symbiosis and cooperation, had a profound and lasting influence on how I came to understand living systems. The realization that what appears to be an individual organism can actually be the result of extraordinarily complex relationships has remained with me throughout my life.
I went on to attend Boston University School of Medicine and became an emergency physician. Medicine placed me in an environment where the physical, emotional, social, and biological realities of being human were constantly present. I encountered people at moments when the structures of ordinary life had suddenly been disrupted. Although medicine and art might appear to be very different pursuits, I eventually understood that both were teaching me to observe closely and to recognize the complexity beneath what is immediately visible. Throughout my years as a physician, I continued making art.
Before I had formal art training, I was essentially self-taught. I learned by painting, looking, experimenting, trying again, and allowing the work itself to teach me what I needed to know. That period was enormously important because I developed an independent relationship with art before entering a formal art environment.
In the 1990s, I began pursuing my artistic education much more intensively. I first studied traditional painting through atelier training, developing a strong foundation in observation and drawing. I later studied at Brandeis University, spent time at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, continued my education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and ultimately received my MFA through Tufts University.
During these years, I also taught painting and printmaking. Teaching became another form of learning. Explaining visual decisions to other people made me examine assumptions about representation, abstraction, perception, and the act of making an image. I became increasingly interested not simply in what an artwork depicted, but in what happens among the artwork, the person making it, the person experiencing it, and the larger world in which all of them exist.
Through my Boricuan mother and my other Puerto Rican relatives, I learned about our Taíno ancestry and about the ways Indigenous presence had been diminished or erased from the histories we were taught. I came to understand colonialism not as something confined to the past, but as a force whose consequences continue through culture, language, power, and the ways people understand their own histories. I learned about the destruction brought by conquest and exploitation, but also about survival: despite centuries of displacement, suppression, and hardship, Indigenous ancestry, memory, and cultural presence persisted. I also came to understand Puerto Rican identity as something formed through the complex intermingling of Indigenous, African, European, and other ancestries rather than as a single, fixed identity.
These discoveries connected with questions already present in my own life as the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and Cuban father, raised between Cuba and New York. They also complicated my understanding of interconnection. Interconnection is not necessarily benign. Relationships can be created through migration and exchange, but also through conquest, displacement, exploitation, and cultural destruction. They can produce mixture, adaptation, resistance, and survival.
Over time, I became aware that two different sources were shaping my understanding of interconnection. Lynn Margulis had taught me about biological interdependence, symbiosis, cooperation, and emergence. My lived and historical experience had taught me about migration, colonialism, mixture, displacement, power, and survival. Art became the place where those two understandings could meet.
My Boricuan and Cuban heritage, my childhood in Cuba, growing up in New York, my experiences in Berlin and Boston, and my movement between cultures and languages became inseparable from the questions I was asking through art. Migration, colonial histories, ancestry, memory, roots, displacement, survival, and belonging increasingly became part of the language of my work.
A pivotal moment came in 1998 when, during a spontaneous performance, I uttered a sentence onstage: “The Actual Experience is the Work of Art.” That statement has remained central to my practice ever since. I began to understand that the artwork was not simply the object that resulted from an experience. The experience itself, including making, remembering, observing, changing, and encountering the world, was the work.
Around the same time, I was thinking about another idea that has remained important to me: “Everything is an abstraction with different degrees of Recognizability.” I have never experienced abstraction and realism as opposites. Whether I am painting a recognizable human face, a biological form, a pattern, a flag, a root system, or something that appears almost entirely abstract, I am interested in the way the mind searches for relationships and constructs meaning.
My interest in complexity science and emergence induced me to collaborate with chaos as a partner in my creativity. I have said for decades: “Chaos is the ultimate creator of the new”.
Over the years, my practice has moved through painting, photography, printmaking, installation, performance, artist books, textiles, and other forms. I have developed bodies of work that may appear quite different from one another on the surface, but I have never thought of them as separate. Ideas disappear and return years later in another form. An image from one body of work may become the seed of another. Something I learned through biology may reappear in a painting decades later. An experience from childhood may suddenly find its visual language many years after it occurred.
Eventually, my life brought me to Raleigh, where I continue to work from my studio. Painting remains the major focus of my practice, particularly my Face Pattern paintings and, more recently, my integration of face pattern with grid-based paintings. These newer works allow many strands of my earlier work to coexist. Faces, patterns, cultural references, maps, biological forms, roots, objects, fragments of language, memory, and everyday experience can inhabit the same painting. I am interested in what happens when these elements interact and what emerges through their relationships that could not have existed through any one of them alone.
There is a continuity between this way of working and the questions about living systems that first fascinated me as a young biology student. Lynn Margulis taught me to see life through relationships rather than isolated entities. Decades later, emergence, complexity, and interconnection remain fundamental to the way I think and make art, although these ideas have traveled with me through an entire lifetime of other experiences.
At this point in my life, I understand my artistic practice as one continuously evolving investigation. I think of it as A Living Ontology of Interconnection. My work asks how identity, biology, culture, memory, history, perception, and lived experience continually shape one another.
Looking back at my journey from childhood in La Habana and New York, through Berlin, biology, medicine, teaching, and decades of making art, I see not a series of separate paths, but experiences that continually informed and transformed one another. What once seemed like distinct parts of my life have revealed themselves to be deeply interconnected, each becoming part of how I understand the world and how I make art.
Perhaps that is what my work has been about all along: nothing exists entirely by itself. We are continually becoming through our relationships with other people, other places, other histories, other living things, and everything we experience. For me, the actual experience of living within those connections is the work of art.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No, it has certainly not been a smooth road, but I am not sure I would have wanted it to be entirely smooth. Some of the difficulties I encountered changed the direction of my life, while others forced me to understand more clearly what mattered to me.
One of the greatest challenges was simply finding a way to make room for all the different parts of my life. For many years I practiced emergency medicine full time while continuing to make art, raising a family, and eventually pursuing an increasingly serious artistic education. Medicine is an extraordinarily demanding profession, particularly emergency medicine, and art requires a very different kind of sustained attention. There were years when time itself seemed to be the most precious material I had.
There was also the challenge of coming to art through an unconventional path. I was self-taught for many years before pursuing formal training. When I did enter the art world more fully, I brought with me an entire life that did not fit neatly within the usual narrative of an emerging artist. I had been a biologist, a physician, a mother, a teacher, and someone whose life had been shaped by different cultures, languages, and places. I had already accumulated decades of experience before receiving my MFA. I never wanted to discard those experiences in order to become an “artist.” They were precisely what I brought to art.
Another struggle has been resisting the pressure to make my work easily classifiable. My work has moved between realism and abstraction and across painting, photography, printmaking, performance, installation, textiles, and artist books. I have created bodies of work that can look very different from one another. The art world often finds it easier to understand an artist when there is a single recognizable style or medium. For me, the continuity has never depended upon everything looking the same. The continuity is in the ideas.
That has sometimes meant that people see what is immediately in front of them without recognizing the larger investigation connecting one body of work to another. A Face Pattern painting, an installation about roots and displacement, a photograph, a performance, or one of my newer grid paintings may appear to belong to entirely different practices. To me they are conversations occurring within the same evolving work.
There have also been the more personal struggles that accompany moving between cultures and identities. I was born in the United States, raised during my earliest years in Cuba, grew up in New York, lived in Berlin, and have both Boricuan and Cuban roots. Questions of belonging, displacement, language, ancestry, and cultural identity were not subjects I selected from a list of possible artistic themes. They were part of my lived experience long before I understood how they would enter the work.
Perhaps one of the most difficult lessons has been learning to trust my own direction even when it was not immediately understood or validated by others. Art can be a strange profession because so much external attention is placed on exhibitions, awards, galleries, critics, and recognition. Those things can be meaningful and important, but they cannot be the reason you continue working. There have been disappointments, rejections, and times when I felt that what I was trying to do was not fully understood. I continued anyway.
As I have grown older, I have become increasingly grateful that I did.
I have worked long enough now to watch ideas disappear from my work and return twenty or thirty years later in forms I could never have anticipated. Something that once seemed unresolved may suddenly become essential to a painting decades later. Even periods of interruption or uncertainty become part of the work.
So no, the road has not been smooth. But I also no longer measure my life in terms of a smooth road leading toward a particular destination. I think of it more as an accumulation of experiences, relationships, choices, interruptions, discoveries, losses, and transformations. Some were joyful and some were difficult, but all of them changed what I was capable of seeing.
And for an artist, learning to see may be one of the most important things we do.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I am a visual artist whose practice has developed over several decades and across many forms, including painting, photography, printmaking, installation, performance, textiles, and artist books. Painting is at the center of my practice today, but I have never thought of myself as defined by a particular medium or style. I am interested in ideas, and I use whatever visual language allows me to investigate them.
When I came to Raleigh, I brought with me several already established bodies of work that had developed during earlier periods of my life. These included Retablos, Paintings for Children and Other Adults, NeuroMorphic Universe, and Making Roots/UpRooted. Although visually quite different from one another, these works were already exploring many of the questions that continue to occupy me: identity, perception, memory, ancestry, biology, displacement, culture, and the interconnected nature of experience. Making Roots/UpRooted, for example, grew from questions about roots that were simultaneously biological, familial, cultural, and geographical. NeuroMorphic Universe explored forms that could suggest neurons, organisms, networks, or imagined living systems. My Retablos drew upon a very different visual and cultural language, while Paintings for Children and Other Adults allowed play, imagination, humor, and the strange logic of childhood to become part of the work. I don’t see these as unrelated series. Each gave me another way to investigate aspects of the same evolving questions.
Raleigh introduced something new. I was always in love with the life force and particularly trees and their roots. Living here, surrounded by the extraordinary presence of trees and vegetation, I began to recognize the importance of the canopy. I had explored roots for years, but I had not yet consciously seen the canopy as its counterpart. I took the Canopy for granted, so was literally blind to the fact that I had not included it in my work. The roots extend beneath us, largely unseen, while the canopy exists above us, composed of individual leaves, branches, light, space, and movement that together become something larger than their individual parts. The canopy gave me another way to think visually about interconnection, emergence, and the relationship between the individual and the whole. That epiphany developed into my Canopy of Leaves paintings and eventually began interacting with other parts of my practice.
This is characteristic of how my work develops. A new body of work does not necessarily replace what came before it. Instead, ideas begin crossing boundaries. They combine, disappear, return, and transform one another. In Raleigh, my Face Pattern paintings also became an increasingly important part of my practice, and this is along with Canopy is probably the work for which I am best known locally. In Face Pattern, the human face becomes both an individual and a kind of terrain. Pattern moves through and across the face, suggesting at different moments biological structures, maps, networks, cellular forms, cultural markings, or forms that cannot be precisely named, or are hidden from the visual world. The individual remains present, but the boundaries of that individuality become less certain.
Face Pattern connects strongly to an idea I have carried with me since the 1990s: “Everything is an abstraction with different degrees of Recognizability.” I don’t see realism and abstraction as opposites. A realistically painted face is already an abstraction. It is pigment arranged on a surface that the mind recognizes as another human being. I am interested in that space between what exists before us, what we perceive, and what our minds construct from what we see. I am interested in things that are not clearly visible, such as emotions or states of being.
Most recently, these different histories have begun converging in my grid-based paintings. Faces, patterns, cultural references, maps, roots, canopies, flags, objects, fragments of language, biological forms, and ordinary things from daily life can now inhabit the same painting. Sometimes they remain contained within individual grids; sometimes they cross their boundaries and become part of something else. An ordinary object can carry many meanings. A mango can simply be a mango, but it can also evoke place, culture, memory, childhood, migration, or something entirely different for another viewer. A root can be botanical, ancestral, cultural, or political. A face can be a particular person while simultaneously becoming landscape, map, pattern, or archetype. I don’t want to prescribe one meaning. I want the viewer to participate in discovering relationships. My background in biology and medicine inevitably enters this way of thinking. Studying biology with Lynn Margulis taught me very early to understand living systems through relationships rather than isolated entities. Medicine taught me another form of close observation and pattern recognition, and the understanding that what is immediately visible rarely tells the entire story.
My Boricuan and Cuban heritage, my childhood in La Habana and New York, and my experiences living in different cultural environments contributed still other ways of seeing. I don’t consciously separate these influences when I enter the studio. They have become part of how I perceive. What sets my work apart, I think, is that I have never been particularly interested in developing a signature style simply so that my work can be immediately identified. I have spent decades developing a way of thinking. My work has changed visually because I have changed, because my experiences have accumulated, and because the questions themselves continue to evolve. The continuity exists beneath the surface.
I am proud that I have allowed that evolution to continue. I have returned to ideas decades after first exploring them. I have allowed one body of work to enter another. I have intentionally painted over unfinished paintings because the act of covering them became part of the meaning of the new work. I have followed ideas without knowing in advance where they would lead. Perhaps what I am most proud of is that after all these years I remain deeply curious. I still enter my studio without knowing exactly what the work will become. Earlier ideas have not become conclusions. They have become material for new questions. Raleigh has been an important part of that continuing evolution. I arrived here carrying roots, both literally and metaphorically, as an important part of my work. Here I discovered the canopy. More recently, roots, canopies, faces, patterns, objects, memory, and lived experience have begun occupying the same paintings. In a way, the work itself has begun to behave like the interconnected living systems I have been thinking about for most of my life.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Did we leave anything out that you would like to share with us?
Perhaps what I would most like to share is that I don’t think of an artistic life as something that moves toward completion. At this point in my life, I have more ideas for work than I have time to make them, and I find that enormously exciting.
I go into my studio almost every day. Sometimes I am continuing a painting that has occupied me for weeks, and sometimes something completely unexpected happens. An object I have lived with for years suddenly becomes an image. An older painting suggests a new direction. Something I made twenty years ago begins a conversation with something I am making now. One idea generates another, and the work continues to surprise me.
I think curiosity is one of the great gifts we can carry throughout our lives. We are surrounded by things we have stopped seeing because they have become familiar. In 1998 I wrote, “We are so familiar with our lives that we are blind to the actual experience.” I still believe that. Art, for me, is one way of becoming attentive again.
I also believe that creativity does not belong only to the young. There is something extraordinary about making work after accumulating decades of memories, knowledge, relationships, losses, discoveries, mistakes, and changes of mind. I don’t experience those years as something behind me. They are present in the studio with me. I have more to draw from now, not less.
Raleigh has given me a place in which much of this later work has been able to develop. I have found community here, exhibited my work here, taught and participated in the arts community, and, perhaps most importantly, continued to change as an artist. I am still discovering what my work can become.
If there is anything I would want a reader to take from my story, whether or not they are an artist, it is to remain curious. Pay attention to what is around you. Allow yourself to change direction. Return to something you abandoned years ago. Make connections between things that other people tell you don’t belong together.
There is always more to see.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://natachasochat.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natachasochat/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQShd9CGQJ8_iFOjLc26xwQ
