Natalie Gale
About
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Artist Statement
"The perpetual movement of celestial gardens ceased. Great cumulus became motionless and no more it sailed stately; no more fleeting shadows,no more petals blowing on the warm breeze, just, pure white radiance."(Gale, Natalie, 'E Cosi Desio Me Mena', page 4, 2007.)
The sensual properties of paint and painting are united with tales of fictional erotic mythologies, surrealist poetry and classical painting, making manifest objects of seduction. Teetering on edge of sickly sweet the work exudes a make-believe feeling, a feeling of something deliciously wicked and indulgent.
Education
2006 - 2008
Slade School of Fine Art
MFA Fine Art,
2001 - 2004
Wimbledon School of Art
BA Fine Art Painting,
Prizes, Scholarships and Awards
2009-2010
Artist in Residence
Sunderland University
2009
July - August
Slade Artist in Residence
UCL
February - July
Edward James Fellowship
West Dean College Chichester
2007
Nomination
Sainsbury Scholarship in Painting and Sculpture
British School at Rome
Exhibitions
Solo
2009
Gabinetto Segreto
Slade University College
London
2007
Wunderkammern
North Cloisters and Library
University College London
2005-2006
The Red Wing
Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art
Sunderland
Group (Selected)
2010
Unrealised Potential
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art
Sunderland
2009
The Voice and Nothing More
Slade Research Centre
UCL
On the Edge
Rollo Contemporary Art
London
2008
Group Show
Curator – Flora Fairbairn
South Kensington, London
Gothic
Arts Centre Washington
Washington
The Future of Statues
West Dean Manor
Chichester
Emerging Contemporary Artists
GatesheadNewcastle Art Fair
Gateshead
Slade MFA Post-Graduate Show
Slade, UCL
London
2007
New Work
SMC Alsop Architects
London
Slade MFA Interim Show
Slade, UCL
London
2005
Unlimited Dream Company
Biscuit Factory
Newcastle
Solo Exhibitions
Lupanar - Reg Vardy Galley
In her solo show 'Lupanar' Natalie Gale explores the concept of 'fragment as fetish'. The work borrows colours and characteristics from frescos, architecture and erotic artifacts, which have been unearthed from the ruins of ancient Pompeii. These acquired elements are then merged with objects, painting and narrative to create an installation of erotically charged entities.
Gale's work takes inspiration from the largest and explicitly decorated Pompeian bordello, Lupanar (VII, 12, 18-20). Its name translates as 'den of the she-wolves' an extension of the word lupa and an ancient Latin colloquialism for a prostitute. Her work Wolf Girl, a small luminous orange panel painting with impasto and embellishments of gold leaf, refers to the Valeria Messalina the promiscuous wife of Emperor Claudius who frequented brothels in secret.
Gabinetto Segreto - Artist in Residence, Slade School of Fine Art
Natalie Gale explores the concept of 'fragment as fetish' in her solo show Gabinetto Segreto or 'secret cabinet'. Seductive, candy coloured distemper surfaces, sensual impasto and inscribed 'graffito' syntagms, recorded from the notorious Pompeian brothel, Lupanar, merge to form 'erotically-charged-entites'.
"The time and no time slowed ACCESS ONLY TO: open mouths and distant talking in subdued murmurs. Below, in the first shadows I lay Cassiopea-wards. She looked at me and shook her piteous inverted head, as did the host of little whites that sprouted from the cubicula's blue carpet, rotting after the recent frost" (Gale, Natalie, 'Gabinetto Segreto', page 1, 2009)
In archetypal Ancient Roman manner, Gale, indulges in erotic writing. Her second short story, also entitled Gabinetto Segreto, a poetic fictional erotic myth vivifies and transforms those that may once have walked the cobbled streets of the libertine place, in the end to be consumed by fire
Abandoned Casement
"We live in gothic times." Angela Carter
Natalie Gale’s paintings, drawings and installations bring together a number of motifs and styles which were taboo in the mainstream of modern art: decoration and pattern: a luxuriant romanticism: overt eroticism: and a bared gothic doom. Several of her paintings reorient the tradition of abstract modern art, by incorporating ornamental forms, found objects and fantasy. For example, in several works Gale reworks the minimalist painter Robert Ryman’s use of white to create surfaces that swerve to becoming to wedding-cake concoctions. Nevertheless, they remain alarming and loaded with contradictory sets of connotations. Whilst at first glance her images might appear almost alluring or saccharine, closer inspection reveals their degree of strangeness and a sense of barely concealed threat. Gale’s installations and sculptures combine details of the natural and man-made worlds in elegant yet jarring juxtapositions. She renders objects associated with display, authority bestial violence – stag’s antlers for example – into enchanted and playful compositions, which nevertheless remain charged with an undertow of menace.
Alistair Robinson, Curator for the Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, October 2008
The Red Wing
Natalie Gale's new installation 'The Red Wing' incorporates both paintings and sculptures based around the body and the contradictions of desire. Gale's abstract oils create hypnotic patterns recalling the interior of the human body more than its external form.
Coated with wax or varnish, the surfaces of her paintings are alluring and tactile, and their colours richly seductive. Gale also presents several sculptures combining artistic and surgical tools and materials within Victorian jewellery boxes, museum display cabinets and industrial machinery. In 'The Red Wing' the project space becomes as a 'cabinet of curiosity', where each object is akin to a relic or treasure presented for our delectation.
Group Exhibitions
Unrealised Potential
Unrealised Projects is an active investigation into the potential of unrecognised, unfinished or unfulfilled ideas. We're collecting proposals from artists, designers, curators, writers, performers and musicians which they have yet to realise or remain unwritten.
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The Voice and Nothing More - Slade Research Centre, UCL
The voice and nothing more was a week-long festival exploring the voice as both medium and subject matter in contemporary arts practices. Both established and emerging artists worked with leading vocal performers and composers in an exploration of the voice outside language.
Group Show -Flora Fairbain
Gothic - Arts Centre Washington
Forming part of ‘Design Event 08’, the UK’s North East annual design festival, ‘Gothic’ is an exhibition which aims to bring together design, craft and fine art that reflects a renewed interest in the macabre, the exotic, the fantastic and the disturbing.
Writings
Excerpt page 17
The collector started with feathers. Or seashells he could no longer recall. A million mementoes seen through a spiralling necklace of brass holes. He, the absent myth from history books had been honeyed and feathered for countless centuries, an eventual immortalised cenotaph of dead skin erect on a collector’s counter.
"The shells grow from filth you know."
Fish shit and leaf like thallus creates a fine art of filth.
Just as the lover’s flower grows with it’s plumage of eyes and hearts
"I have done as the Rosicrucian's. She love's me, she loves me not, and I pluck its eyes and hearts. It is cultivation of your shapeless detritus, Nesri."
Hair locks of loose golden thread
Ribbons
Boxed pearls
Feathers
Handkerchiefs
Butterflies
Feathers with their evil eyes
Feathers
Nails
Loose stray hair
Crystallised sleep
Mucus soup
Yours and mine
E Cosi Desio Me Mena or And So Desire Carries Me Along
Tales of myth, the Last Testament, modernist fiction and Surrealist poetry are re-appropriated to evolve a short erotic story/poem. Protagonist’s identities within the researched literature are juxtaposed and manipulated creating my principal characters Morlise and Nesri. The structure of the text is an elongated poem, the style of which is abstract and proceeds as one verse, comparable to that of Virgina Woolfe’s method stream of consciousness in her novel Mrs Dalloway and also Andre Breton’s romantic and poetic novel Nadja.
By creating my own mythologies I can directly inform the work, making manifest visions of the erotic, through the object as painting.
Performance
All in the Easy Orange Yellow Light 2009
A woman sits alone. In her distance a golden romantic landscape. Amid the glow of orange-yellow light she reads in whispers from her small book indulging in it what appears to be story time before bed. But is she as innocent as she first appears?
The performance reading was taken form the short story E Cosi Desio Me Mena and carried out in whispers, consequently embodying the secretive nature of the pocket sized erotica – books we take to bed and read under the covers or disguise with other literature of respected morals.
Spectators therefore had to stand or kneel close to the reader in order to hear the story. They in turn make what is essentially a private erotic experience public.
The female protagonist Nesri of the story is a seductress a siren of sorts, a hybrid creature that is part woman, goddess, and bird. Her character and the ‘seducee’ role of male protagonist Morlise simultaneously occur during the performance, both sadist and masochist personas manifest in the innocence the performance first appears to the later reading of erotic encounters.
The Pleasure Seeker 2005
The young woman sits, still, wearing an off white worn night gown.
Perched on the edge of the blood-red velvet chaise lounge, in a forgotten room, she waits.
Into the distance she stares.
In front of her lies a cushion. In its centre is a polished silver bowl, housing a glass vessel filled to the brim with wine.
She reaches for the glass vessel.
She lifts it to her mouth.
She begins to drink, slowly lifting the vessel higher and higher and higher.
The wine drips.
Rivulets form down her chin and neck.
Flowing down the night dress is stained.
She tips the vessel further, the wine engulfs her and floods the gown.
Calmly she places the empty vessel back into the polished silver bowl.
Into the distance she stares.
- All images © Natalie Gale
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