Meet me on the astral plane
Alley Arts Centre, Strabane
2021
Installation Views
Statement
Natalie Pullen is a Dublin-based visual artist concerned with the awkwardness, vulnerability and absurdity of making an abstract painting and asking someone to look at it. Her solo exhibition Meet me on the astral plane shows a series of paintings within her ongoing project 'Co-'.
Co- is a prefix, unfixed, waiting to be fixed to another term, to change its meaning through this latch or bond. Co- speaks to the potential collective and relational aspect of an encounter with a painting in a gallery. It moves away from the expectation of excavating meaning from the individual artwork and instead invites a more compassionate and expansive encounter.
What does it mean to not know what you're looking for, and begin anyway?
This body of work was created from a partnership between the artist and her materials in the studio, in the midst of uncertainty and isolation due to the pandemic. High quality linen, sized with rabbit skin glue and primed with clear gesso, provides a particular surface. Oil bars allow her to draw with paint, and watercolours leave immediate and unalterable stains.
The medium is not used to illustrate a pre-existing idea, but rather the work comes into being on the canvas. The viewer will meet something not fully resolved, hovering between drawing and painting, abstraction and landscape, open to participation through attentiveness.
The exhibition offers a space to be with that which we do not need to fully understand, but can bear witness to anyway.
Accompanying Essay
by Sara Muthi
The visual arts are a twofold process. Step one concerns the artist, their intention to create. Making. Step two concerns the viewer, without whom the work remains unfinished. Unactivated. With this framework in place we can begin to consider Co-, the latest body of work by the contemporary painter Natalie Pullen.
Abstract painters like Pullen do not take for granted what it is to make a painting. There are no givens. At every level of production there is a reconsideration of what it means to make marks on canvas. Pullen employs a particular surface, that of stretched and clear-primed linen. The drawing and dragging of oil bars allow for a particular and perhaps unorthodox application of colour on surface. Contrasted with this oil paint drawing, battling between artistic intention and material guidance is the staining of surface by watercolours.
"Every artwork is indescribable. And since we can neither grasp a painting in language nor exhaust it in experience, how can we assign it a meaning? Indeed, the value of modern painting lies not in its meanings or even its actions, but rather in its unlimited potential for staging meanings and actions." — David Joselit
Co- as a body of work takes this process seriously, addressing the weight of the task at hand, standing firm through the turbulence of uncertainty and possibility. Pullen leans into the absurdity of creating labour-intensive abstract paintings and requesting an audience to appreciate the realisation of this labour. It is in the deep realisation of this request that Pullen rewards the act of looking and grants it as a valid form of participation.
In this second step, the work ultimately finds potential, as opposed to meaning. It is meaningful only insofar as it is Co-.
Sara Muthi is a former painter, writer and curator based in Dublin.
Exhibition Details
- Venue
- Alley Arts Centre
- Location
- Strabane, Northern Ireland
- Year
- 2021
- Type
- Solo Exhibition
This exhibition was kindly supported by an Irish Arts Council Visual Artists Bursary award, and Fingal Co. Council artist funding.