Natalija Walbridge works on the background of the piece she will finish for fairgoers at the Minnesota State Fair. Photos by Fanjie

For years, Duluth fabric artist Nataljia Walbridge found a practical way to make a living with her creativity. She designed and sold bags, building a business that allowed her to work with fabric while keeping her artistic ambitions alive.

But by the end of 2024, she decided it was time to make a bigger gamble.

She stopped making bags and committed herself to creating fabric collage artwork — intricate, painstaking pieces inspired largely by the plants and wildlife she sees outside her home on Park Point and near Hearding Island.

Now that leap is taking her all the way to the Minnesota State Fair.

She has been invited to participate in Studio: HERE, a State Fair program that selects 12 artists — one for each day of the fair — and gives each a workspace inside the Fine Arts Center. Rather than simply displaying finished work, the artists spend 12 hours demonstrating what it is actually like to make art.

For the Duluth artist, the invitation came as a surprise.

“I literally had to read it several times to even take it in,” she said.

The program is intended to give fairgoers a glimpse into the time, concentration and labor behind finished artwork. Visitors may see a completed painting or sculpture and have little sense of how many hours went into making it. Studio: HERE puts that process directly in front of them.

That is particularly appropriate for an artist whose own process is exceptionally slow. Her fabric collages can take three months or longer to complete. Rather than painting with a brush, she studies her subjects — birds, insects and plants — and uses fabric pieces to reproduce their markings and details. She cuts the fabric into precise shapes and attaches the pieces with fusible adhesive.

At the State Fair, she will create a purple finch against a background depicting a blossoming crabapple tree.

The background awaits the addition of fabric to the purple finch.

She has already prepared the background. During her 12-hour session, she will cut the individual fabric pieces for the bird, assemble them and, at the end of the day, iron them together so the finished bird can be lifted from the work surface and added to the background.

It is essentially a sped-up version of a process that normally unfolds over weeks and months.
She is not entirely sure she can finish the bird in 12 hours.

In a typical day, she said, she might complete only eight or 10 square inches of one of her highly detailed pieces. The purple finch will be somewhat larger and use larger pieces of fabric, but there is another variable at the State Fair: the people.

She is an introvert, she said, and while she enjoys talking with people about her work, she is accustomed to creating alone in her studio.

“I’m really not used to creating my art on a stage,” she said.

The prospect of spending 12 hours working while thousands of fairgoers pass through is therefore both exciting and nerve-racking.

She has done shorter demonstrations at art shows, but nothing approaching this scale. She expects she will have to find a balance between talking with visitors and concentrating on the work.

Ultimately, though, she expects the energy of the fair to carry her through.

The invitation is also significant because of what it represents in her career.

She applied to the State Fair’s Fine Arts Exhibit with her “American Mink” the previous year but was not accepted. The piece subsequently appeared in a juried show at the Hopkins Art Center, where her work had already attracted attention. Another piece exhibited there won a jury award and sold.

Her work has also received recognition closer to home. Two of the pieces she will have at the State Fair were People’s Choice Award winners at the Duluth Art Institute in 2025 and 2026.

Natalija at work in her Park Point studio/home.

For an artist who only recently committed herself to making art full time, the State Fair invitation feels like a major validation.

“It’s like the biggest honor of my career, really so far,” she said.

She sees the opportunity not just as recognition for herself, but as a way of carrying Duluth’s artistic identity to a statewide audience.

Her work is deeply rooted in the place where she lives. She can find inspiration simply by looking out her kitchen window or stepping into her backyard. Even during winter, she said, she sees something new.
The landscape is especially meaningful because much of it is difficult to see from land. The southern end of the island and surrounding shoreline reveal a natural beauty that many people encounter only from the water.

She wants her work to help more people notice it.

There is also a documentary impulse behind the artwork. Changes in water levels and environmental conditions can affect the wildlife she sees from year to year. By carefully studying and depicting those species, she hopes her work will preserve a record of what exists there now.

Her goal is realism, though not necessarily photorealism. The fabric itself contributes texture and visual character. She researches the animals, plants and insects she depicts, paying attention to the markings and characteristics that distinguish one species from another.

Occasionally, the fabric itself helps determine the direction of a piece.

While working on a green heron hidden among dark shoreline foliage, she found a hand-dyed piece of fabric that shifted from bright magenta to nearly black purple. She cut it into a tiny strip and incorporated it into the shadows near the bird’s beak.

The vivid color worked against the yellow of the bird’s eye, creating a subtle visual tension and directing the viewer toward whatever the bird appears to be watching.

After the State Fair, the work will continue traveling. Her State Fair pieces, including the purple finch, will be joined by nearly all of her other unsold work for an exhibition at White Bear Center for the Arts opening Sept. 12. The show, “Seven Women Enduring,” will feature seven women artists, each with an established practice in her own medium.

Rather than showing just a few works from each artist, the large exhibition space will allow each artist to display roughly 10 to 12 pieces.

For the Duluth artist, it will offer viewers a chance to see nearly the full scope of her work (for details, visit whitebeararts.org/exhibitions/the-seven--women-of-enduring-vision).

But first comes the State Fair — a 12-hour experiment in making art, talking with strangers and seeing whether a process normally measured in months can be compressed into a single day.

Whatever happens, she said, she plans to roll with it.

“I’ve never done anything like this,” she said. “It’s going to be improv too. We’ll just see.”

For someone who spent years wondering how she could make a living as an artist, simply being invited may be proof that the leap was worth taking.