NAT DECKER, Root-bound, 2025

Archival Pigment Print 11 x 17 in Edition of 15 + AP Signed and numbered by the artist Accompanied by a certificate from Always Art Root-Bound takes its name from the condition in which a plant’s roots outgrow their container, pressing against the limits that once sustained them. Working between sculpture, digital media, and accessibility rooted in disability justice, Nat Decker reflects on how bodies, ideas, and communities take the shape of the spaces they occupy, growing while contending with pressure, constriction, and adaptation. Created as Rip Space evolves and searches for a new physical home, the piece is an intuitive meditation on real life support systems imagined as a shifting digital environment. “The image depicts interlinked chains and tentacular forms rendered in silvery and opalescent tones. The composition combines mechanical and organic elements, evoking both living creatures and machinery suspended in motion. It gestures toward the tension between structure and growth, containment and expansion. BIO: Nat Decker is a Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based artist utilizing technology, sculpture, and performance to interrogate the politicality of the alienated body/mind in relation to collective care and liberation. Working critically with technology, they explore material as extension of the body and anti-prosthetics. Their practice fundamentally integrates accessibility and collectivism as generative mediums. Nat has exhibited work internationally - most recently in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and New York - and delivered artist talks at Tokyo Future Visions Summit, Dweb Camp, Rip Space, NEW INC DEMO2024, and Whitney ISP. Their collective, Cripping_CG, was awarded a 2024 Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellowship. They are a Y10 and Y11 member of NEW INC, a 2024 mentor and 2023 Fellow at the Processing Foundation, a 2024 Coaxial resident, a 2024 fellow at the Decentralized web camp, and a 2021 resident and current staff of ACRE. Nat has professionally consulted on accessibility for organizations including p5.js, UCLA, Creative Growth, and New Art City. In June 2022, they graduated from UCLA with a degree in Design|Media Arts and Disability Studies.