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Artist's Statements
View the:- Artist's Brief Biography
- Current Work » The Natural Motif: Decorative Patterns to DNA
- Collapsed Explosion: Notes On the Corpus Series
- Field Series Artist's Statement
- Domestication Series & and Canis Series Artist's Statement
- Mythology Series, Academia Series & Early Work Artist's Statement
- Statement About Printmaking
Artist's Brief Biography
Natalie Settles is a native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, US. Exhibited nationally and internationally, she has been showing her work since 1999. Settles earned her BA in Fine Art at Northwestern College in St. Paul, MN, and continued her studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2003. After graduating, Settles' curiosity about natural history prompted her to explore the realm of museums; she was awarded an internship as model-maker for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC making objects for the National Museums of the American Indian, American History and Natural History. She returned to full-time studio work in 2004 continuing her nature-based works. In 2005 she was an Artist-in-Residence at Fellesverkstedet Myren Gård [The Workshop at Myren Garden] in Kristiansand, Norway. She spent the first half of 2007 making new drawings based on decorative and scientific patterns while living in Cambridge, England and traveling abroad. In 2008 she was awarded the Wisconsin Arts Board Artists Fellowship for her new works exploring pattern.
Biological science and the natural world fill Settles' works. She harnesses the way science and art have both collapsed the concepts of abstraction and representation-from separate categories to a matter of frame-of-reference. Settles easily navigates a variety of media including sculpture, drawing, installation and printmaking processes; her work carries a distinctive spatial bent, and an intense awareness of form no matter the concept or media. Settles is currently exploring the role of natural patterns in art and science.
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The Natural Motif: Decorative Patterns to DNA
Art and science traffic in detecting and creating patterns. Over the past fifty years, the natural sciences have increasingly become Òinformation sciences,Ó with technological advances producing vast amounts of genomic data in particular. At the same time, the world of fine art is embracing an information-age culture saturated with visual spectacles. In such a time information is cheap, but the ability to find or develop meaningful patterns in all this data is as difficult as it is valuable. The thirst for pattern in art and science is what drives my current series of drawings.
My interest in the scientific study of patterns in nature, like genomics, grows out the place where I live; Madison, Wisconsin is an international hub of genomic and biological research. Friends and colleagues pursuing research in diverse areas of the natural sciences surround me. As and artist in such an environment, I am compelled to reconcile how scientific discoveries of pattern in the natural world affect the way one sees nature, from the from the fascia of leaves and twigs, to their molecular makeup, to the genetic framework of whole species.
I grasped a new understanding of the way decorative patterns in the art share roots with patterns in science while I lived and worked on the campus of the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom during the first half of 2007. It was there I was reintroduced to the decorative, nature-based patterns of William Morris (1834-1896), the prominent Victorian designer from England, who embellished many of the college halls. The work of Morris and his contemporaries, especially the botanist and designer Dr. Christopher Dresser, reflected a 19th Century preoccupation with repetition and order in nature. The search for order in Morris and DresserÕs time would propel many of the discoveries of the 20th Century. In fact, it was there at Cambridge a mere half-century later that natureÕs pattern took on new significance with Watson and CrickÕs discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA.
Drawing in the studio both in Cambridge and now back in Madison, I use snippets of MorrisÕ and DresserÕs wallpaper and textile patterns, plucked from their full context and repeated into a cloudy haze. Detailed images of dead vegetation such as sticks and husks appear as anthropomorphic specimen drawings. The images within the drawing combine in shallow layers like Victorian wallpapers, or organisms on a microscope slide. Colored forms stain the drawing, isolating objects and forming new patterns. The works are both drawn illusions of nature, and fragments of nature itself: paper, organic pigments, and graphite. Paper is in fact dead plant material, and in a number of the works I emphasize this by composting the drawings outdoors with other plant matter. The works embody a build up and breakdown of pattern.
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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
Formally, my sculpture and prints and drawings deal primarily with space and form. The sculpture often takes the shape of planar objects that project into the space and experience a physical change in reaction to that space. The two-dimensional works take on a feeling of sculptural negative space. Images often trail off the edges of the paper, reminding the viewer of its physical limitations in size and shape. The paper becomes a physical space, which the images enter and exit.
As an artist who feels at home in a major research institution, the content of my recent work—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 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 our various needs and wants. This work, however, 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 the wild. 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.
Currently in the studio, my works have expanded to feature domesticated herds, often sheep. My continuing exploration of the human space now includes the squared-off human dirt-grave. Recent deaths of several friends and family members in succession have made the rush of herd-like-life and the rush of the grave very real. These works take the forms of high contrast graphite drawings and mixed media sculpture. The sterility of western death seems like such a neat, square ceremony for creatures and humans that are anything but sterile and square.
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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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