Natalie Pullen

Both, and

Platform Arts, Belfast

2023

Both, and exhibition installation view at Platform Arts

Installation Views

Statement

Natalie Pullen is an artist who makes paintings which are almost drawings, and drawings that are almost paintings. She works in the mediums of oil bar, watercolour and oil paint on linen canvases, paper and panel. The abstract surfaces reference landscape and organic forms, and are informed by her body's relationship to the land during travel and residencies in South America, rural Spain and the West of Ireland.

In the studio the artist collaborates with her materials in a committed partnership, with all the attention, care, doubt and struggle such an alliance entails. High quality linen, sized with rabbit skin glue and primed with clear gesso, absorbs stains of watercolour. Oil bars allow her to draw with paint as she deals with line, shape and colour.

The exhibition shows a series of new paintings alongside process drawings and notebooks, to visually connect the artist's experience of making in the studio with the viewer's experience of looking in the gallery. It is a moment of sharing and making public during the artist's ongoing negotiation with the forces of opposition within her practice.

The title references thinking through contemporary painting as a series of paradoxes:

  • Both drawing and painting
  • Both material and conceptual
  • Both intellectual and emotional
  • Both decorative and meaningful
  • Both resolved and becoming

The exhibition offers a space to be with that which we do not need to fully understand, but can bear witness to anyway.

Exhibition Details

Venue
Platform Arts
Location
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Year
2023
Type
Solo Exhibition