ABOUT

Artist statement

I am a painter, no doubt about it. With its illusionistic capabilities and mesmeric tactility, there is a simmering magic to painting and process. Finished paintings slowly reveal themselves, electric-hued palimpsests of decisions and doubts. Just as you think a painting has expired beneath your hands, a line of cadmium red revives it: it breathes again. Paintings travel between birth and death a thousand times in the making of them, as though zigzagging up the river Styx. Paul Klee once said that in making paintings his hand was the “instrument of some remote power”. I too find painting to be an exhilarating seesaw between focused thought and something more akin to divination in nature. 

My name is Natalie Mather. I am an artist whose practice spans painting, drawing and collage, with a focus on imagining, mapping and marrying impossible geographies and architectures. My visual language is a melange of cut-and-paste aesthetics, speculative architecture, generous nods to the geological, and pattern and palettes strongly influenced by 1980s art and design. The effect of this melange is bordering-on-baroque terrains - paintings that contain rhapsodic, precarious structures that lead into and out of themselves without a clear exit or entry point, paintings where depth and surface fold together - terrains that are part-landscape, part-portal, barriers and throughways both. I see my role as an artist as a kind of wayfinding process through imagined territory - and often the territory does not yet exist.

The red thread of my practice is a perpetual interest in how images can, even if temporarily, transport us via the imagination - a “brain to brain” transmission engineered by a similar, if not same, “remote power” of the kind Klee identified.  I ask, how far can a painting take you, both into and across its surface? And how can this imaginative travel transform our sense of where we are in space when we look at a painting? Are we here? Or are we in there? And how did we get to where we are?

Biography

Natalie Mather works from Melbourne, creating paintings, drawings, and collages that explore the territory between real and imagined spaces. Her work, which she describes as "imaginary geographies," weaves together diverse influences: geological formations, architectural studies, and the bold visual language of 1980s design.

Working with a vibrant palette and layered compositions, Mather draws from multiple sources - speculative fiction, natural sciences, and historical architecture - to create works that invite sustained and transportive attention. 

Mather completed her Masters of Fine Art (Research) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2021, supported by the Graduate Completion Scholarship, Stuart Black Memorial Scholarship, and Carolyn and Hans Varney Prize. Her work has been recognised in several notable awards, including the Bayside Painting Prize, Fishers Ghost Art Award, and Macquarie Emerging Art Award, and can be found in private collections in Australia and internationally.

All work is the intellectual property of Natalie Mather unless otherwise stated.