Natalie de Rozario undertook a Quick Response Residency in Studio 4 from 17–30 August 2026.

During her Quick Response Residency with PICA, Natalie de Rozario explored connections between myth, ancestry, cultural identity and belonging through engaging with community archives and storytelling. Natalie’s multidisciplinary practice draws on personal and collective histories, using photography, collage and surreal portraiture to consider migration, memory and diasporic identity. In this conversation, she reflects on her time in residence and how inviting artists and community members into her studio to share their own family histories expanded her thinking around belonging, cultural identity and participatory practice. 

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Your project A Bag of Rice for a Saturday Child explores myth, ancestry and belief. Did anything emerge during the residency that shifted or expanded the way you think about these ideas? 

What really surprised me was how much recognition there was from artists from different cultural backgrounds. I was overwhelmed by how generously people shared stories, memories and intimate details of their lives with me. It made me think less about myth, ancestry and belief as things that belong to a particular culture, and more as ways we make sense of where we come from and where we belong. 

It also reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for a while: that cultural identity isn’t necessarily a fixed thing you inherit. Sometimes it’s something you piece together, invent, question and continually negotiate. The residency gave me a lot more confidence to follow that idea through my work.

You were interested in developing participatory and community-engaged approaches during the residency. Can you talk about why this is an important part of your process?

I have a slightly stubborn belief that everyone is innately creative. Art can be a tool for connection, expression, rebellion, imagination and sometimes just to process what is going on. For me, community engagement isn’t about making art about people; it’s about creating space for people to bring their own knowledge and experiences into the process. I’m interested in what happens when the artist isn’t the only person holding the paint brush, so to speak.

I’m interested in making space for stories that are often overlooked or underrepresented and thinking about how they might sit alongside the many other stories that make up our collective understanding of Australia. 

Were there any particular conversations, encounters or moments during the residency that stayed with you?

There were so many Jen Datu sharing story about pineapples in Filipino mythology really stayed with me — those seemingly small, everyday moments that end up carrying so many core-memories and personal meaning.My conversations with Emma-Lee Maher also stayed with me. She spoke about experiences of being in-between spaces of belonging and never feeling completely accepted by any one group. That resonated with my own experience of navigating a diasporic identity, while also reminding me that these experiences are not interchangeable.

Those conversations made me realise that sometimes the most interesting connections happen in the messy spaces between categories — between cultures, generations, places and identities.

Can you talk about the process of working with community and inviting them to bring in images of their family?

The idea came from my own investigation into my family history. I’ve never travelled to my ancestral lands and, because of the ongoing violence and political situation in Burma/Myanmar, my family was told it wasn’t safe for us to return. So I grew up with this strange combination of distance and longing — knowing there was a place I came from but having very little possibility of physically going there.

Instead, I inherited photographs, fragments, stories, objects and memories. Art and imagination became ways of building a relationship with something I couldn’t directly access. That experience shaped A Bag of Rice for a Saturday Child, and during the exhibition I was struck by how many people recognised themselves in those stories. People would look at an old family photograph or object and suddenly start telling me about their own grandmother, migration story, superstition or family ritual.

During the PICA residency I wanted to experiment with that exchange more deliberately — using family photographs, collage, storytelling and surreal portrait techniques as ways of inviting people into the work, rather than simply presenting my own family archive. It feels like the beginning of a much bigger research process. My upcoming residency with Watch This Space in Mparntwe/Alice Springs will continue this enquiry, allowing me to think about how these ideas shift when I move between different communities, places and cultural contexts. 

What does care, dialogue and community connection mean to you within your artistic practice? 

For me, it’s about curiosity, listening and holding space for what is shared, what is not for me, and what sits in between. I’m interested in how stories, memories, dreams and beliefs travel between people, and what happens when they come into contact with each other. I don’t want to borrow or speak for someone else’s experience. I come with my own diasporic history and my own questions, and I’m interested in creating space for other stories to sit alongside that. Sometimes there are surprising points of connection, and sometimes there are boundaries or differences that need to remain. 

I think that’s also why this residency has been important for me. PICA became a testing ground for a methodology I’m still developing: how can personal archives, storytelling, participation and experimental image-making come together without flattening people’s experiences into a single narrative? 

I’m interested in what happens when you slow down, listen to place and allow the work to develop through relationships rather than arriving with all the answers.For me, the bigger question is about how art can become a space for people to recognise something of themselves — while still making room for difference, complexity and the things we don’t yet understand. 

PICA’s Residency Program is supported by PICA’s Art Ambassadors.