Even the lightest touch can leave a lasting trace
Natalie Hunter
Even the lightest touch can leave a lasting trace
2020-2023
Natalie Hunter
Even the lightest touch can leave a lasting trace
2020-2023
Archival pigment prints on silk draped over hand-made birch and aluminum sculptures, air. Unique photo-based installation documented at Factory Media Centre.
25" x 72" each print. 28" x 50" x 12" each sculpture.
How do you catch a breath? How do you hold light? How do you hang on to a memory? Even the lightest touch can leave a lasting trace encompasses many ideas I’ve been trying to understand through my work for many years. Immaterial concepts like time,
memory, light and space through image and material form. Through this endeavour I’ve tried to understand what it means to want to try and catch and hold a breath in material form - like my mother’s or my late aunt’s. Or try and hold the shifting light in familiar spaces, preserve a memory in physical form, and failing in these attempts. This installation attempts to unravel the complexities of time, light, and motion, human bonds and the fragility of memory through an embodied material exploration in photo-based silk, light, air movement, and sculpture in the round. Even the lightest touch can leave a lasting trace is mutable. Kinetic in nature delicate translucent prints on silk billow and shift with moving air currents in the room. The imagery depicts my mother and I having a wordless conversation with through hand gestures, shadows, and light. Caught between stillness and motion these gestures in space attempt to capture what cannot be kept; a breath expelled, sunlight as it moves across a space through time, a human gesture, or the sensations of a memory caught in the mind. Our bodies constantly flow through spaces everyday, and our breath is just as delicate and weightless as the light that envelopes these spaces. Flowing on air currents Even the lightest touch can leave a lasting trace is as elusive as trying to catch the wind. Revealing the inherent breath of the architectural space they occupy.
Video Documentation: Even the lightest touch can leave a lasting trace