About
Studio Research
Natalie Hunter is from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Working across photography, installation, sculpture, and the moving image, she is mostly known for her multilayered and experiential photo-based installations on transparent film. Her studio practice engages with the poetics of time, memory, temporality, chance, perception, the archive, and the senses - with an emphasis on embodied experience, perception, materiality, personal memory, and identity.
Natalie Hunter's intricately layered installations study the complexities of time, space, memory, and the senses in our digitally saturated culture through an interplay between image, material, and form. With a fascination for both image making and working with materials by hand she explores the shifting sensory experiences of light, colour, and motion as they relate to memory and perception. She often employs and exploits the immaterial principles of photography - light and time - with the material aspects of sculpture in her installations. In both image making, sculpture, and their installation, light is fundamental to her process. Whether sculpture or image based she engages with immaterial concepts, ephemeral processes, and material form while considering how the spaces in which we dwell affect our perceptions of time and place, and resonate with associations of memory and the senses.
Over the past twelve years she has pushed photography into an expanded sculptural field. Working with translucent silk, transparent, colour, reflective, and backlit films, she drapes, folds, curls, and bends images in space over hand formed metal, wood, or acrylic glass armatures. Durational in nature, these sculptures and installations change based on the time of day, the angle of the sun, the quality of light, or a viewer's perspective. Her evocative installations composed of image and sculpture create contemplative spaces and experiential encounters that become poetic meditations on the act of making, the fluidity of memory, and our relationships with the material and immaterial worlds we exist in. The translucency and mutability of her sculptures and images speak to the fluidity of thought and memory, and become meditations on temporality and impermanence. Witnessing the slow passage of light through time, her work reflects upon the nature of time and place, embodiment and being, the psychology of space, and consciousness in our image saturated world.
Biography
Natalie Hunter is the recipient of many Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grants, and Ontario Arts Council Visual Artists Creation Project Grants. She has shown her work in public art galleries and artist-run-centres, including: Rodman Hall Arts Centre, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Smokestack Gallery, Hamilton Supercrawl, Hamilton Winterfest, University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Windsor, Thames Art Gallery, Mississauga Living Arts Centre, Centre 3 for Artistic and Social Practice, Factory Media Centre, Hamilton Artists Inc., Latcham Art Centre, Museum London, Propeller Art Gallery, John B. Aird Gallery, Gallery TPW, G44, Londsdale Gallery, University of Manitoba School of Arts Gallery, The Reach Gallery Museum, and Capture Photography Festival, Niagara Artists Centre, and the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery, among others. Her work has been featured in Hamilton Arts and Letters, Femme Art Review, The Gathered Gallery, Other Peoples Pixels blog, Canadian Journal of Culture Studies, and BlackFlash Magazine. She holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo where she is a sessional instructor, and received an Excellence in Online Teaching Award (2017). She lives and works in her home city of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.