From Artist to Advocate: Why I’m Releasing My Studio Archive Now

Before I became a divorce doula, mediator, and high-conflict divorce coach, I was a full-time artist.

For years, I built a professional art career centered around experimental, camera-less photographic processes involving light, chemistry, and material transformation. My work was exhibited and collected internationally, installed in hospitals, universities, hotels, restaurants, and corporate spaces across the United States and abroad. My artwork appeared on television shows including The Big Bang Theory, Portlandia, Scandal, Last Man Standing, and others. At one point, my entire life revolved around making art.

I was obsessive about process.
Obsessive about experimentation.
Obsessive about figuring things out.

I even authored and filed my own U.S. patent, without an attorney.

At the time, I had no idea that would become symbolic of so much more than art.

I was simply an artist trying to protect an idea I believed in.

I spent countless hours researching systems, learning unfamiliar language, studying procedures, and teaching myself how to navigate structures that initially felt inaccessible and intimidating. I didn’t come from a legal or technical background. I just believed that complicated systems were still learnable if I was willing to devote enough energy, curiosity, and persistence to understanding them.

Years later, during my divorce, I found myself doing something unexpectedly similar all over again.

Learning systems.
Learning procedure.
Learning documentation.
Learning how to advocate for myself inside structures that often felt overwhelming, exhausting, and designed to feel inaccessible to ordinary people.

I don’t romanticize self-representation. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

But looking back now, I can see the throughline clearly:
persistence,
research,
creative problem-solving,
documentation,
pattern recognition,
and the refusal to believe I was incapable of understanding something simply because it was complicated and designed for attorneys.

Sometimes the skills we build in one chapter quietly prepare us for survival in another.

Then, another major transformation unfolded in my life.

I didn’t stop creating art because I lost passion for it.

I stopped because I became a mother.

And like everything else I love deeply, I threw myself into it fully.

I became a deeply present, hands-on, all-in mom. A stay-at-home mom. A homeschool mom. A constant activity and caregiving mom. I poured my energy into creating stability, protecting peace where I could, and carrying the invisible labor that so many mothers quietly carry every single day.

And I was doing it alone.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand that I was already functioning more like a single parent than a supported partner.

So art slowly receded into the background.

Not because creativity mattered less.
But because caregiving and motherhood took precedence.

Then divorce changed everything.

When shared parenting finally became reality, I began reclaiming parts of myself that had been dormant for years.

Not because motherhood became less important.
But because, for the first time, I had room to exist as both:
a devoted parent and a deeply passionate creator.

At the same time, my advocacy work was growing.

My work as a divorce doula and high-conflict divorce coach grew directly out of lived experience, survival, and a genuine calling to help others navigate systems that can feel devastating, isolating, and impossible to understand when you’re inside them.

Over the years, I’ve worked privately with individuals navigating divorce, custody disputes, coercive control, post-separation abuse dynamics, documentation strategies, parenting plans, and the emotional reality of rebuilding a life after profound rupture.

And eventually I realized:
my art and advocacy work were never actually separate.

Both ask questions about power.
Visibility.
Identity.
Systems.
Voice.
Survival.
Transformation.
What gets documented.
What gets believed.
What gets hidden.
What gets erased.

Now, those worlds are beginning to consciously merge:
art + advocacy.

What comes next for me is rooted in the belief that art can do more than decorate walls.

Art can challenge systems.
Start conversations.
Document survival.
Expose contradictions.
Hold grief.
Create connection.
Help people feel seen.
Help people feel less alone.

I’m entering a new chapter where creativity and advocacy are no longer separate parts of my life.

My next body of work is deeply informed by identity, survival, motherhood, divorce, gender, systems, healing, visibility, and transformation. It will expand conversations I’ve been having privately for years into a much more public sphere.

As I begin that next chapter, I’m also releasing pieces from earlier chapters of my career through a month-long Studio Archive Sale.

Some of these works have been stored away for years.

Now they get to live in homes again instead of storage while helping fund the next phase of this creative and advocacy work.

This sale isn’t just about clearing space.

It’s about honoring the path that brought me here.

Releasing work from one chapter.
Funding the next.

And making room for a new body of work that blends creativity, advocacy, lived experience, and larger cultural conversations about systems, survival, and identity.

The Studio Archive Sale includes:
• local browse-by-appointment opportunities in Central Oregon
• original archival works
• framed and unframed pieces
• shipped mystery art bundles
• and selected works available for one month only

Thank you to everyone who has supported my work over the years — whether through art, education, healing work, advocacy, or simply by witnessing this evolution in real time.

What comes next feels deeply personal.
And deeply purposeful.

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See and read more about my artwork here.

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See the Studio Archive Sale on Facebook here.

👀 LOCAL BROWSE-BY-APPOINTMENT 👀
Come browse available framed and unframed pieces in person.
Pay what you want — $5 minimum per piece.
Schedule an appointment here.

📦 SHIPPED MYSTERY BUNDLES 📦
For non-local supporters, I’m offering curated mystery bundles of 3 original unframed works from my archive.
$55.55 includes shipping.
Purchase here.

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With love and deep gratitude to walk alongside you,
💖 Natasha 
Divorce Doula ​• Certified High-Conflict Divorce Coach • Certified Mediator
Educator • Survivor • Advocate • Author • Artist