Natasha Pike
Bio
Natasha Pike is based in West Cork after several influential years living and working in Berlin. She has an MA in Art and Process from the Crawford College of Art and Design and a BA in Fine Art from Falmouth University. In 2020 she was recipient of the Lismore Castle Arts Graduate Award Exhibition and was shortlisted for the RDS Visual Art Awards. She has had solo exhibitions at Clonakilty Arts Centre, Lismore Castle Arts St Carthage Hall and Origin Gallery Dublin. She has recently been selected for a Munster Technological University purchase prize and has received the Visual Arts Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland.
Artist Statement
Lucretius states in his prose Of the Nature of Things that all matter is perpetually raining down. I believe this force of substance is requiring a moment of our attention. The work is driven by an exploration of matter, played out here in the dynamic between the painted surface and made object. A set of abstract encounters between humble materials are established using painted or raw, stretched or un-stretched canvas, simple fabrics, cement, and wire. This staged encounter is a function of formal decisions I make around the qualities of the raw material, colour, surface, texture, weight, scale and line. I do not overly transform these materials but rather give an allowance for balancing the interacting physical matter of them. There is a vital materiality to each object and painted surface, and in organising them into assemblage they take on a new agency together, capturing the energy of their form in new containment. In Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, she discusses the participation of human and non-human forces, the interconnected moving along together of all matter, a mutual absorption in living and an ecology of difference. These ideas influence the installation of the work I make, becoming a set of conditions for holding a spatiality open, a space for attention, and claiming an aesthetic language through a poetic framework.
Website www.natashapike.com
Email tash@natashapike.com
Blog www.natashapikeart.blogspot.ie
Facebook www.facebook.com/natashapikeart
Instagram www.instagram.com/natashapikeart
Membership: Studio 
