Soe #2 

Shin #1 

Soe #5

Judging (2023)

Soothing (2023)

Carrying (2024)

Falling (2023)

On a research trip in July 2022 Natalie Guy visited Joanna Margaret Paul’s inspirational Stations of the Cross at 

 in Port Chalmers. Paul’s bright vibrant renditions of the stations were pained fresco like directly into their white plaster niches in 1971. Rarely seen as they are normally covered with traditional print versions of the stations, which has helped conserve them in pristine condition, Paul’s stations worked with deep purples, bright yellows and black and white, are a departure from the domestic paintings for which she is most renown. Responding to the interior to the architecture and the bright stained glass of the chapel, she tells the story of the stations in bold unmodulated forms. As Gregory O’Brien perceptively writes in 

; “The choreography of empty space was one of Joanna’s great and defining skills as a painter. The Stations are a case in point. Therein the faces of her subjects are left white, their emptiness a kind of translucence – a tabula rasa, even . . . By concentrating colour in the space between and around the figures, she highlights the points of interaction, contact and separation. Her Stations are an honouring of these spaces as they are of the emblematic figures of religious faith. (https://landfallreview.com/a-living-response/)

Inspired by Paul’s Stations in the Star of the Sea Chapel, Natalie has now produced six freestanding sculptures referencing six specific stations. Titled: Judging, Falling, Carrying. Soothing, Mourning and Returning. The freestanding metal sculptures echo the bright opacity of the stations and define shape and space while incorporating negative (white) space and translucency. Translating Paul's paintings to sculptural form “Guy considers the meditated or framed view, through which she approaches the compositional definitions in the Stations. She chimes with Paul’s peculiar colour symbolism, creating cut-out shapes to reference the figures. Literal windows in Guy’s sculptural pieces echo Paul’s mediated view: the hinged doors and windows in the poem, and the formal framings of the Stations.

Natalie Guy

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 object

Natalie Guy's Freestyle series continue this dialogue, embracing a quiet material minimalism with an emphasis on compositional structure and a formal sensibility. Her intention is to create works that are a mix of the familiar and the ambiguous which wryly acknowledge the desirability of leveraging a mid-century aesthetic. Transforming repurposed objects and materials - often themselves replicas - into new contemporary works with a ‘pseudo-modernist’ aesthetic, providing the apotheosis of a period style: a projection into the future of a period yet to be lived in.

A key reference in this series is Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging—a centuries-old practice rooted in Buddhist and Shinto spiritual traditions. With its emphasis on minimal grace and asymmetry, Ikebana is another historical décor accessory that is often incorporated into contemporary interiors. Like the modernist object. the arrangements confer an element of international style – here with the reach extending to an ordered naturalness.

Ikebana in the beginning was very simple, constructed from only a very few stems of flowers and evergreen branches, this first form was called Kuge. In the 20th century, with the advent of modernism the three traditional schools of ikebana partially gave way to what is commonly known in Japan as Free Style. In the Sogestu School of Ikebana, shin, soe, and hikae are the terms for the 3 main pieces of an arrangement. Shin is the longest branch, and represents heaven; soe is the medium branch and represents man; and hikae is the shortest and represents the Earth.

The works in this exhibition, somewhat like enlarged Ikebana, drawing on both the Jiyūka tradition (free creative design which is not confined to flowers; any material can be used) and the modernist sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s stage design for Martha Graham's 1958 dance Embattled Garden. Noguchi’s design used a sparse grouping of branches symbolising trees held within an ovoid base – which reminded Guy of an Ikebana in a shallow vase. Like Noguchi’s trees the branches in this exhibition are no longer natural they have become permanent bronze sculptures with blooms and stems of brass, an Ikebana for the future modern interior.


Natalie Guy - Freestyle

Natalie Guy - Freestyle