Natalie Majaba Waldburger

Derived from a series of self-portraits as twins, my most recent series again uses self-portraiture and includes animals.  Ermine, the first painting of the series marks a point in my work where an image of an animal replaces the Other, or the phantom twin.  This animal is taken directly from Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine.  Like the twin series this series of self-portraits looks at race and identity.  In my past series’ searching for a metaphor for identity that inhabits a liminal place between the politics and the personal.  The idea of the twin, or vanished twin proved apt as it presented the feeling of the fractured identity of the second generation immigrant and identity of mixed race.

The animals in the new series act as the ersatz twin.  Chosen from Renaissance paintings the animals are depicted as lap animals, domesticated yet still wild, ermine, swan, parrot, monkey, dog.  They are made famous by and through other contexts; they are from other portraits and from another period in art.  This hybridity and referencing of art history emulates the fragmented construction of an Asian and European identity constructed by western culture in Canada.