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Artist's Statements
View the:- Artist's Brief Biography
- The Natural Motif: Old Patterns in Modern Science
- Collapsed Explosion: Thoughts on Abstraction and Representation in Natural Forms
- Field Series Artist's Statement
- Domestication Series & 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 model-maker 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 intermingles the histories, inquiries, and forms of art and science. For over a decade her work has lead to collaborative projects with researchers in biochemistry, botany, physiology, and zoology. In 2007 she lived and worked in Cambridge, UK independently researching Victorian design and topics in biology for her series of drawings on paper and wall. Settles was a 2008 Wisconsin Arts Board Fellow with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her recent wall drawing environment entitled Ornament and Architecture was featured in the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial. She is currently based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she teaches in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University and is the artist in residence in the Tonsor Laboratory for Plant Evolutionary Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh.
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 ideals—universal 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 Minnesota), and Dr. Burr Settles (computer scientist, now at Carnegie Mellon University), 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. I've been particularly influenced by the idea of the individual as a particular "ornament" within the overall "pattern" of its species and environment—a 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.
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.
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.
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.