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Artist's Statements
View the:- Artist's Brief Biography
- Current Work » The Natural Motif: Old Patterns in Modern Science
- Collapsed Explosion: Notes On the Corpus Series
- Field Series Artist's Statement
- Domestication Series & and Canis Series Artist's Statement
Artist's Brief Biography
Natalie Settles earned an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003. She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1999 including venues in Norway, Brazil, New York, Chicago, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and California among others. Settles interned at the Smithsonian Institution in 2003 as a modelmaker and sculptor, fashioning objects for the National Museums of Natural History, American History, and the American Indian. From anatomy and anthropomorphism to domestication and minimalism, Settles' work has engaged the often-parallel concerns of art and science. Her work has lead to collaborative projects with researchers in biochemistry, zoology, and physiology. In 2007 she lived and worked in Cambridge, UK independently researching Victorian design and topics in biology for her current work in the Natural Motif series of drawings on paper and wall. Settles is a 2008 Wisconsin Arts Board Fellow now based in Pittsburgh, PA.
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The Natural Motif: Old Patterns in Modern Science
In the Natural Motif series of drawings on paper and wall, I graft together elements of plant detritus with decorative motifs from Victorian wallpapers. The source plant matter is small, such as the inch-long twig drawn in Fractionate (2009), though in the drawings they are significantly magnified and begin to take on the air of bones or grotesque, fleshy appendages. The drawings are spare, like the backlit image through a microscope or a Spartan museum presentation. The red in many of the pieces evokes the process of staining otherwise invisible samples on a specimen slide, and has the visceral overtones of blood. The Victorian motifs haunt the images like Platonic idealsÑuniversal answers to the twigs' particularity.
I fastidiously plan the wall drawings using scale models, but quickly execute them on the wall in graphite over a week or two. Once completed, each drawing lasts only until the end of the exhibition and is then painted over--like a lavish plant with a short lifespan. One previous wall drawing, Transcribe (2009), was described by a reviewer as, "so purposefully temporary it feels performative." The works immerse the viewer, exploding past their field of vision and arching over their heads. Indeed, viewers engaged Transcribe in a curious dance where after inspecting the corner details, they then stepped well out from the drawing. This created a curiously specific, alchemical interaction between audience and the piece, which made it appear as though the work occupied a three-dimensional space.
The Natural Motif series initially evolved out of a decade among scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Through discussions with researchers such as Dr. Theresa Grana (developmental biologist, now at the University of Mary Washington), Dr. Kelly Aukema (biomolecular chemist, now at University of Northern British Columbia), and even my husband Dr. Burr Settles (computer scientist, now at Carnegie Mellon), I came to view nature as puzzle of knowns and unknowns, and science as a process of elaborating, inducing, and deducing patterns from a seemingly infinite field of genes, proteins, and molecules. IÕve been particularly influenced by the idea of the individual as a particular "ornament" within the overall "pattern" of its species and environmentÑa perspective originally put forth by the 19th Century German biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel.
My current work was also shaped by a formative time living in Cambridge, England in early 2007. There I met the work of Victorian designers whose patterns embellished the college halls and museums with nature-based motifs, such as William Morris and Dr. Christopher Dresser. These decorative motifs looked back at me from the dawn of biology: in the 19th century scientists were just beginning to suspect the underlying patterns of genetics that governed growth and form. Especially Dresser's patterns reflected the budding science of the era, and I began to quote them in my work like the ghosts of patterns suspected, but not yet fully known.
Upon my return to the states I was awarded a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship in 2008 for my work engaging art and science.
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Collapsed Explosion: Thoughts on Abstraction, and Representation in Natural Forms
Abstraction and representation have collapsed into one another. Fifty years ago biochemical and genomic analysis transformed the taxonomy of organisms from a system based on phenotypic (observable) traits into a web of genetic relationships. In the past decade biology has stepped from a practice of observation to a sifting of information, which is had cheaply and in quantity. Scientists continually abstract natural forms from their most elementary concepts into progressively exploded components. Each of these levels of detail, from fascia to minutia, is a true representation of the object or creature, and an abstraction from one level of information into another level of information.
In the form of a pet, a perfect fall day, or a loved one—all the biochemistry and genomic information becomes an arresting gestalt to the mind and senses. The abstraction of code and chemistry, and the representation of the individual hang in one of the most fabulously crafted tensions. The implosion of abstraction and representation happened because natural forms have multiple identities that are not discrete.
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Field Series
Death is about what is missing; the void is palpable. The field of white, rather than the graphite imagery, forms the focus of each work in the Field Series. For these pieces, the white of the paper is more than an arbitrary substrate, but the focus of the work. I watch how the fields of white affect the images and choose titles based on those relationships, frequently selecting a word that is both noun and verb—an object and an action.
Working with graphite is meditative. It is a medium that does not usually produce images quickly; the hard thin pencil point yields only small amounts of material at a time. The slow, methodic process of using graphite allows a lot of time to watch the drawing take shape in the surrounding white space of the paper. I provoke the images out of the paper and out of my gut like an animal whipped into a show of strength. Working the piece incrementally through a long detail-focused process gives me an odd, cathartic detachment from the image as a whole. The well-crafted nature of the works is in its own way a method of embalming.
The unwieldy rush of life, death and disease among family and friends inevitably leaves me wrestling with something bigger than myself. I brood over questions about loss, absence, time, and distance. I am along for the ride, acted upon by the churning mass of contradictions in the work; watching each image emerge to distill my thoughts. As I watch the drawings materialize, they seem to have more in common with the sterility of hospital death than the actual dirt of graves. Sanitized and almost monumental, the images appear to stand in place of a traditional marble headstone. Alone and disembodied from a specific context, the images suspended on the paper remind me of the absent-but-there nature of a corpse.
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Domestication Series & Canis Series
As an artist who feels at home in a major research institution, the content of my recent work in the Domestication Series is drawn substantially from classic fields of study like veterinary anatomy and also from scientific theories about the human-animal relationship. Biology, zoology, veterinary medicine, paleontology, and taxonomy are natural habitats for the ideas in my work. Images and concepts I have gleaned from files of animal skins at zoological museums, the behavior of dogs at animal shelters, and my work as a sculpture and modelmaking intern at the Smithsonian Institution pack my sketchbooks and feed my work. The focus of the domestication series has been the dog, and a disdained home-dweller, the rat. The dog is a loaded image because of its years of association with humankind. It is the subject of centuries of anthropomorphism on account of our struggle to understand that long-standing relationship.
My early work in this series started at the basic biological level by peeling back the layers of anatomy within the dog and pushing the possibilities of what a canine body could do and how it could be constructed. Soon I began to study and produce work concerning the dog's roles in society and specifically how their adaptability has become a multifaceted tool for human needs and wants. However, the human uses of the dog drove me to consider the ethical implications of domestication. What I found surprised me and profoundly influenced my work. Many scientists now believe that domestication was the result of the process of natural selection, much like the development of any other symbiotic relationship in nature; this means that the whitewashed rectilinear human home is the natural environment for many domesticated animals. With further study I discovered that many other non-domesticated animals, like rats, have sought out contact with humans and our environment and flourished disproportionately on account of that contact. Man-made dwellings as native habitat became the curious focus of my prints and sculpture.
The square sterility of modern human constructions inspired, both formally and conceptually, this series of sculpture and prints. The work looks at the influence of rectilinear spaces on natural forms. The planar sculptures of rats and dogs project into the gallery and physically adapt in reaction to that space. The prints affect a similar feeling of sculptural and architectural space; images trail off the edges of the paper, reminding the viewer of its physical limitations in size and shape. Like the gallery, the paper becomes a physical space, which the images enter and exit. On paper, in life, and in the gallery, natural forms vie and coalesce with squared-off environments.
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Mythology Series, Academia Series & Early Work
Printmaking, my primary field of work, is an art form that has demanded conquest. It is not a technically casual process. Intuitively expressing myself though a medium that demands so much of my brain is challenging. I love to think in reverse images and compositions. It is like a game in which the outcome really does matter. I am fascinated with the way prints show the history of the method that created them: wood grain, scrape marks, reduction and production states.
A significant force in my work has been the history and culture of Poland. While traveling and volunteering there, I drew incessantly. When I returned home the Greek myth of Artemis—the huntress who traveled the skies with her dogs playfully calling her on—metaphorically mimicked the gravitational pull I felt to return to Poland. After my second trip there I became restless in my square, sterile, mass-produced America because I had seen too much of the carved, cloistered, cobble-stoned European reality. However, my immediate American context was an exception. The Romanesque motif of the college where I studied and lived became a release from gutless architecture. I began to study the art and architecture of the Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance periods. My interest piqued when I saw a heavily robed and brightly colored commencement procession on the Romanesque campus. It was a traditional of visual honor. I started to collect regalia catalogs and written work on the Latin and Gothic origins of the velvet and woven garb.
My study of the robed figure gradually expanded to include an interest in the nude figure. The human figure is an intricate structure that communicates about its inherent qualities, and its relationship to other figures; much like the symbolic purposes of regalia. Hands, faces and feet are such complex machines, but their form is powerfully intimate. The positions and spaces between figures distinguish friends from enemies and mates from acquaintances. Even alone the figure’s form is expressive in relationship to its ground.
I continue to pursue a variety of ideas related to my work. Presently I am studying Latin as a result of my interest in the Classical Roman and Greek myths. The relationship of the universal subject matters in these stories and the universal image of the human form is very interesting to me. The more I learn, the more questions I have, and consequently I make more art to explore these questions.
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About Printmaking
Printmaking is an art form that can produce multiple original works of the same image, not to be confused with poster-prints, which are sold as copies of a single original. A set of multiple runs from one plate is called an “edition.” Each edition is limited to specified number of prints also called “impressions.” The smaller the edition, the more each impression is worth; a small edition is considered to be any number under 25 impressions.
There are four main types of printmaking and several are even commonly used to produce everyday printed material. Lithography uses the principle that oil and water do not mix to create oily areas on a metal or stone plate that attract ink in certain patterns to be printed. Various forms of lithography are used to create most printed matter today—books, magazines, packaging, etc. Serigraphy (also called screen printing) is the process of using a squeegee to press ink through a fine mesh that has been masked in certain areas to create the design. Serigraphy is still used to produce many of the images on tee shirts. Relief printing is the most ancient of the printing methods. One of the most recognizable forms of relief printing today is rubber-stamping. Carved wood, stone, metal and synthetic materials may be used to print raised images and type. The final method, intaglio (in-TALL-ee-oh) includes engraving, etching, drypoint, and etching. Intaglio printing uses grooves, ridges and textures to trap ink on the surface of the plate, and transfer the ink to moistened paper when run through a press. Etching – my primary printing method of choice – is an intaglio technique that uses metal plates (usually zinc, copper, or steel) that have been etched in a strong acid or base to produce the grooves and textures for trapping ink.
Printmaking is a complex but ancient form of art-making that presents a welcome challenge to problem-solvers like myself because of its complex process.
A few technical notes to fellow printmakers: I employ several uncommon methods in my work. One is the use of shaped plates – plates cut into the shape of an image instead of the standard rectilinear shape of metal plates. The other method is manipulated aquatint –in which I sometimes manipulate the rosin on the surface of the plate before baking it into place, as opposed to leaving it evenly spread. This allows new textures that could not easily be achieved with stop-out and etching alone.
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