at Origin Gallery 21st October – 15th November 2016
NATASHA PIKE grew up in rural Ireland in the eighties and nineties. This instilled a deep connection with her environment. A strong independence formed in her early years gave her the thirst to travel extensively and to study abroad. All giving her work an original style.
Emigrating to Germany in 2013, Natasha found herself in the hot bed of Berlin’s artist community. Here she worked, exhibiting successfully with her peer group. Her painting ‘Social Achievement’ was used by the fashion designer Julianna Bass and printed on fabric on several dresses before going down the runway at New York Fashion Week. Pictured here.
Undertaking a regular mentorship with artist Katherine Boucher Beug and workingcollaboratively with two Berlin based artists has allowed for what appears to be an exciting growth and a broadening of ideas within Pike’s methodologies.
Drawing since childhood Natasha has manifested into her process based practice, largely preoccupied with identity; environment, society and thus through the spectrum down to a personal level. Pike’s work once described by a psychiatrist as the ‘Queen of what is not there’ may leave a space in which the work hangs together. The complex is simplified in these works and the simple given the full weight of all meaning.
ARTIST STATEMENT…
“Your identity is my sanctuary – We need each other”
“After years and months of sketchbook drawings and several large paintings I trust it is apparent that what is being explored in my work are the dynamics of identity. From a societal level right down to personal relationship, the identity of others and ourselves creates the action and reaction that I find fascinating. The ego in its many forms and states of being is a powerful thing. To study its struggle and surrender became a focus of the time I spent in Berlin.
Having been immersed in that art scene for several years, the colours, shapes and surety of line are a reflection of the raw energy and subversive environment in this bare all beast of a city. Moving from a solitary and rural life to practice in this vast environment forced an uncomfortable realisation and recognition of a connectivity between and a necessity for the ‘others’ that we need as human beings sharing this planet. And I went on to form a curiosity with the ego of the self and of others, and the possibilities of what can happen when we clash or when we accommodate each other.
With a foundation in the symbiosis of memory and imagination, drawing and writing are the tools and beginning of my language. This language consists of an individual and abstracted alphabet through which to communicate a vision. Using gathered imagery or text, and an awareness of the interaction of colour the ‘alphabet’ becomes metaphor for comment on a host of deeper subtleties of the human condition that which we all share.
From sympathetic drawings of a horse or a flower, to free use of blocks of painted colour, a phallic symbol or an abstracted crown – what I wished to convey was something poetic in the deliverance, a gaining of power, whilst all the while with hopefully the greatest of delicacy and the lightest touch.”
NATASHA PIKE will continue until 15th November 2016
The Origin Gallery 