Los Angeles-based artist Nat Decker works across digital media, sculpture, and performance to examine complex layers of embodiment, virtuality, and liberatory networks. In the following conversation, they discuss their path to becoming an artist, working collaboratively to challenge stigma, and the ongoing evolution of Crip Aesthetics.

Jessica Gomez Ferrer: You've shared that you were an older non-traditional student studying art and disability studies. Could you talk about what drew you to those two fields, and describe your creative upbringing?

Nat Decker: I was a bit of a misfit kid, not very popular in school. I was a tomboy and an only child. That pushed me to spend a lot of time alone building these fantasy worlds to occupy myself. I was influenced by both my parents, who were major collectors of tchotchkes, and our home was always full of these rotating seasonal collections of cute little objects and decorations. They would even build little miniature villages for different holidays.

As an artist interested in world building, I look back on their holiday decorations as a practice of world building, and something that shaped how I'm understanding objects as carriers of memory and rituals of decoration. I'm really interested in returning to those objects now as a sort of family archive, especially bonding that to queer lineage, because I was raised by lesbian parents, and thinking about ways I could embed different renderings of those tchotchkes with a preservation of stories from their life.

As an alt teenager growing up in Chicago, I found sanctuary in DIY art and music scenes. I found my way to a lot of basement shows and warehouses, spaces that were these sort of living art installations built by people that were experimenting with alternative and collective ways of life. Then I moved to Oakland when I was nineteen, and I found a similar community. I was making bad music in little bands, taking film photos, was a part of a darkroom film collective, and I started working in live sound and working as a preparator at different art spaces. And then, in my mid-twenties, I had a very difficult transitional time. I had a major medical crisis that permanently altered my ability and upended my life, and it was a moment of reorientation.

I had lost housing, work, and stability. I had been working at the Oakland Museum of California and they fired me for becoming disabled. I was also learning to adapt to loss of mobility. It was this major time of transformation, but I had this sensation that there was nothing else to lose, and I think that somehow emboldened me to take more risks. At that point, I had always been in an art community, but wasn't sure what I was doing, and it was at that moment that I took this risk, and made a decision to pursue a career as an artist, so I moved to LA, and I applied to UCLA.

It was the only school I applied to. I was happy I got in. I was in my later twenties, and I entered the design media arts program. I chose it because it would allow me to pursue an art practice, but then I also felt like I could develop these potentially employable skills that didn't rely on physical labor. I was thinking about how I was going to survive financially, how I was going to be able to work and sustain myself, and about how all my previous work had been physical in some capacity. While I was at UCLA, I found the disability studies department, and that was really important in giving me a language and framework to wrap around this experience that I was still actively adjusting to. I continue to be really interested in the possibilities of the overlap of those two fields, thinking about the relationships between assistive technology, labor, and capitalism, addressing things like structural bias and perception. 

Pursuing art still feels precarious. It still feels like this risk I'm taking each day, but it also feels like it has been a survival strategy for me. It's a way that I've been able to process the things that I've experienced, understand the world, access truth, connect with people... And so, yeah, it's this risk that I continue to take that gives my life great meaning.

Jessica: As somebody who works both digitally and physically, how do you decide what medium is best suited for an idea?

Nat: There's so much exchange between the two mediums that they're not really existing independently of each other in my practice. Even if I'm making sculpture, if I'm not directly integrating some element of digital fabrication, then I'm doing mock-ups, designing, iterating, or building off of some idea that was started in the digital space. And that's partly an access strategy because I'm working digitally to be able to work from a place of rest — it helps preserve my bodily stamina, making it possible to complete some of the physically demanding work I want to do. But it is very much about my interest in the exchange between those two mediums. Physical objects have this undeniable power of presence and weight, but in my practice, I am really interested in also identifying how that exists in the digital, arguing for the validity and power of digital presence, and identifying virtual space as something that's very important for disabled people specifically, who are so often excluded from full physical participation due to things like inaccessibility, pain, or impairment.

I'm also interested in the ways that virtual spaces aren't ruled by the laws of physics, gravity, and bodily limitation in the same way, and that's coming from my experience as somebody with a physical experience that's shaped by things like precarious balance or weakness. And so that weightlessness in the virtual space is something I find really interesting. At the same time, I'm interested in getting to feel the materiality of sculptures, and getting to touch objects, and building real objects, and exploring them as an extension of the body, making heavy objects that I often can't move by myself. And so having to ask someone else to carry or install these objects, assist me with these objects, that sort of becomes a performative extension of the work as well.

Jessica: What role do distortion, warping, and glitching play in your work in your worldbuilding?

Nat: Those gestures are often ways for me to translate my embodied experience into software. Part of that embodied experience is the sensation of constantly being perceived, whether that's by doctors, institutions and infrastructures of care, state surveillance, and most often by random strangers, who stare or speculate, trying to figure out what's wrong with me. It's that interrogating gaze that can make my body and the ways I move feel like this distortion, warping, or glitch from the rhythm or flow of so called normal life.

Glitch and distortion as mediums can feel like these moments of recognition for that experience, and then by appropriating those qualities like error, warping, and malfunction, I'm able to reframe them as something that's generative rather than defective. And that lets me claim agency over my difference, and access the potential aesthetic and political possibilities that emerge from being perceived in this way that's out of sync or as a glitch or error.

Jessica: For folks who may be unfamiliar, could you talk about the impetus for Cripping_CG, and what you've learned from working collaboratively?

Nat: Cripping_CG is a collective project with artist Cielo Saucedo and Olivia Dreisinger, and it's centered on disability and computer graphics. We're interested in how CG worlds, whether that's in games, animation, VR, or digital art, rely on asset libraries, avatars, and motion systems that are often reproducing normativity. We're looking at how the instances when disability does appear in these mediums, it's often with a layer of stigma. For example, a wheelchair is included in a horror game asset pack, or an atypical gait is animating a zombie, or injuries are used as spectacle. 

It's very process-driven, research-driven, and experimental. We want to recognize how representation alone is not enough, that the visibility in these mediums matters, but without addressing the underlying power structures that produce the exclusion — things like ownership, access, labor, consent — that representation can be hollow or even obfuscating.

Cripping_CG approaches these tensions by building an open community-driven archive of disabled avatars, objects, and animation rigs shaped by participant agency. We're thinking a lot about how archives themselves are political, how access should be negotiated and contested. It's an ongoing project. 

The collaboration has allowed me to explore sharing authorship, allowed us to slow timelines based on our needs and capacities, and I've learned so much from the peers that I'm working with. It's a project that's been on hold for a bit, but Cielo and I are planning to return to it this year.

Jessica: How would you define access intimacy?

Nat: Access intimacy is a concept coined by Mia Mingus, who's a very important figure in the disability justice movement, and I consider it as something that recognizes the unique closeness that results from access needs being either anticipated or met or understood. It describes that sense of safety and interdependence felt with another person, as a form of sanctuary within an ableist world. I explored this idea in a performance that I did with my close friend, Jules Garder, at the 2023 Gray Area Festival in San Francisco. For this performance, we repeatedly assembled and disassembled my electric mobility scooter. This is a routine we perform anytime that my scooter needs to be transported in a car, and the performance took place in front of a captioned video of us describing some of the qualities of that routine. 

The ways that my friends care for me, and these types of rituals, I consider access intimacy. For example, Jules knows the order of operations for assembling and disassembling the scooter, how to fit my walker in the backseat of her car, how my body moves, the things it needs, and how to anticipate my needs. It's a form of care that's learned over time and is very deeply felt, and I think especially felt in contrast to the numerous moments where that understanding is absent in my life.

Jessica: How have residencies like Latitude and ACRE impacted your practice?

Nat: ACRE, for anyone not familiar, is a sleep-away artist residency, it's based in Chicago, but takes place in rural Wisconsin. It's very special and dear to me. It's a beautiful community. ACRE was the first residency I ever did, so it feels very foundational in my career, and is a relationship I’ve continued that feels foundational to my practice now. I was a resident in 2021, and I've returned every year since as a staff member. It's offered me this tangible sustained community that's dispersed across the country, and access to peaceful rest, and nature, and invitation into this ongoing practice of collective care and cooperative labor. I have a lot of respect for the organization, the way that ACRE operates in alignment with its values and the values of its collective members, including signing onto PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and remains committed to that work at great risk as an institution.

It's a place where relationship building and those forms of care are paramount to any kind of productivity or professionality. It's where relational bonds are really deepened through this shared closeness over two weeks when you're at summer camp together. I have a lot of love for ACRE, all the people who are a part of it, and I continue to work with the organization. 

Latitude is based in Chicago, it's at a print lab, and it's a production residency that gives artists access to the print lab facilities. This residency was important to me because it gave me a chance to return to my hometown, which felt like this opportunity to process memory and grief that's inevitably tied to that location for me. I got to really focus on some techniques, I learned a lot about printing, got to experiment with some different materials, and produce a lot of prints in the lab. I stayed involved afterwards by advising on accessibility during Latitude's move to a new space. They were able to upgrade to a fully accessible space, so I was helping with that advisory committee, which felt like a meaningful extension of my work with the organization. 

Residencies are so important in offering critical support and the continued development and growth of an artist's practice. They function as this opportunity to change the rhythm of your day-to-day, to breathe new perspective, and the time and space to research and experiment, the opportunity to meaningfully connect with other artists. Both those programs were enormously impactful and I'm grateful to have an ongoing relationship with them.

Jessica: What changes or developments within Crip Aesthetics have you observed since graduating in 2022?

Nat: I'm still forming a mental framework that defines Crip Aesthetics. It's something still actively being defined, still emerging, and it's hard to feel like an expert. There's a long lineage of theory and practice that continues to shape that work. But that said, I'm trying to participate in that building. I was thinking about the contrast between pre-2022 and post, and I think there was a lot of work prior to 2022 being made that was in direct response to the pandemic, in which disabled people were using art and media to expose the ways they had already been living with health vulnerability or risk, asking for things like remote accommodation, and been masking prior to that becoming this major collective experience.

Maybe after 2022, I noticed a move towards a more explicit expression of outward solidarity, especially the ways disabled artists are recognizing how deeply disability and ableism are embedded within systems of military occupation, settler colonialism, and state violence. I've seen this a lot in the ways that disabled artists are using their voice and their labor to do things like condemn the genocide in Gaza or calling for the abolition of ICE. I see insistence that disability justice is inseparable from these broader struggles for liberation.

I am really inspired by the work of my peers. I see incredibly important, challenging, vital work from disabled artists, many of whom I get to call friends, people like Cielo Saucedo, Meesh Fradkin, Andy Slater, and Panteha Abareshi. It's not necessarily that there's a unified aesthetic, but I think there is this shared commitment to a complexity, or a refusal, or solidarity that I love about all this work.