Biography
Natalie Guy is a sculptor working across the mediums of bronze, steel, wood, glass, and plastics. She has a particular interest in the legacy of mid-century modernism and how our memories of the stylistic cues inherent in architecture, art, and objects from that era can be engaged and defamiliarised through translation into new sculptural objects. As a female artist based in Aotearoa, addressing international modernism through a glocalised lens, she questions and confronts the iconic nature of modernism by presenting work which questions the legacy while acknowledging her relationship to her urban surrounds. Following in the feminist literary footsteps of the the écriture feminine movement of the 1970’s which aimed to re-capture text as female self-expression, she rewrites modernist source anew.
Influences include the modernist architect Jane Drew, theorist Isabelle Graw’s thoughts on mutual influence, artist Hito Steryl’s eassy The Language of Things and Nicholas Bourriaud’s argument for the altermodern era in The Radicant.
Guy (Ngāpuhi, Ngāruahine) lives and works in Auckland, Aotearoa. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout Aotearoa in public and private galleries and exhibitions, including Tauranga Art Gallery, Te Tuhi Auckland, Scape Public Art Christchurch, and Sculpture on the Gulf Waiheke. In 2022 she completed a doctorate in Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts, the University of Auckland. She was the recipient of the inaugural Asia NZ Foundation 2017 Residency to Varanasi India and in 2019 was resident at Sculpture Space, Utica, NYS. In 2014 she won the Woollahra Small Sculpture Award and in the same year won a Merit Award in The National Contemporary Award. Her 2020 work The Pool is a permanent public work in Christchurch.