Sticky icky sacred geometry with artist and weed witch Natalie Smith
Following pipe dreams and manifesting magic
As some of you know, I started a podcast in October 2021. Maybe you forgot. It’s OK, I don’t update it very regularly, which should give you some lead time to catch up with sit downs including legendary author and journalist Alia Volz, Kush Queen cannabis impresario Olivia Alexander, the incomparable Tammy Faye Starlite (who coincidentally has a show coming up at Joe’s), and Chicks vs. Stigma owner Brenda Hernandez.
On the show this week: Multi-hyphenate artist, creative and self-identifying weed witch Natalie Smith. Based in Los Angeles by way of Chicago, she has an interdisciplinary practice that mixes painting, drawing, installation, video, writing, and curating. Her work covers the intersections of space, geometry, and the spirit realms, exploring the ways in which our experiences and bodies operate in isolation within ourselves and as a channel of communing with others.
Back in August 2021, I invited Natalie onto The Weed Witch podcast—which did not exist at that point—ahead of the debut of her show “Nothing Within or Without” at Bad Water, a gallery in Knoxville, Tennessee. Natalie was among my coterie of art school friends who used cannabis during a very different time in weed culture, and I wanted to hear about her pipe dreams. How does “being under the influence” influence her creative process?
Predictably, I dropped the ball, the show came and went, and after several nudges, I finally handed her the mic two years later. The reason for this was two-fold. First, “Nothing Within or Without” came out in 2021, a time when society was dealing with messy emotional processing and personal growth in the midst of emerging from what felt like a trauma-induced isolation sensory deprivation tank (well, at least some of us did). Second, her work sounds cool. It requires extracurricular reading. Inspired by Dutch Jesuit mathematician and astrophysicist Georges Lemaître, the installation is conversationally poetic, tackling topics of existence and death, sacred geometry, ancient fertility, the womb, and tree of life. You know, the kind of complex ideas you’ll never find casually streaming within the algorithm.
Exploring the depths of our own subconscious and blurring the lines between realities can be a terrifying, exhilarating, and enlightening journey—which is why psychosomatic plants have historically fueled abstract creative projects and astronomical/astrological revelations throughout time (plus, an influx of sophisticated functional art within the cannabis space in more recent years). Having just gone through my own psychedelic-inspired existentialist dive into John Horgan’s “Rationalism Mysticism,” and Linda Goodman’s “Star Signs,” in 2020 after my cosmic little stint as a weed astrologer, I was curious about the ancient rituals, symbolism, and sacred private practices behind this new project.
As we make our way through Pisces season, Natalie lights up a joint and has a casual chitchat about vesica piscis and the lack of Pisces in her chart, her favorite mind-altering substances, the occult and Devil’s Lettuce, being the lone stoner in your friend circle, discovering your inner weed witch, and for all the hackers out there—her new email password!
Listen, like and share the episode below. Follow Natalie and her art on Instagram, and make sure to follow The Weed Witch for all of the latest and greatest. Have someone in mind that you think should be on the show? Drop a line at itstheweedwitch@gmail.com.
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