A Soil Thick With Promise
Solo exhibition curated by Katherine Gressel
Established Gallery
Image list may be found HERE.
Saturday, June 3 – Thursday, June 29, 2023

ARTIST/CURATOR STATEMENT

be careful
i am fertile
a soil thick with promise
a mouth full of petals
you can feel when you are near me
how i may touch you
and you may blossom…

 …be careful
i am fertile
dream by my river
whisper longings under my moon
if the world says yes, i feel it
watch, i’ll unfurl in every direction
to let tomorrow through 

  • Adrienne Maree Brown

Natalia Nakazawa’s work engages with themes of transnationality, diasporic contexts, migration patterns, storytelling, archiving, and institutional critique at a time when such issues are at the forefront of current political debates. A Soil Thick with Promise, the artist’s first solo exhibition, features new painting, textile and ceramic work centered around the form of the vessel. Also incorporating waves, butterflies and other symbols of transition as well as patterns from diverse cultural influences, these works ask questions like, “What do we carry with us? What can we preserve? What do we promise ourselves? What moves us?” 

The exhibition title, taken from pleasure theorist Adrienne Maree Brown’s poem be careful, i am fertile, alludes to the radical importance of pleasure in confronting personal and collective transition and loss, and in creating and experiencing art. The title also directly references soil as the source material for the clay vessels on display. Natalia first started making small vessel paintings while working from home and grieving lost family members during the pandemic lockdown,“haunted” by this shape and its multiple associations: history, domesticity, burial rituals. Natalia eventually began to translate this form into flat ceramic objects, finding pleasure and social connection in the material’s tactile and utilitarian nature. Yet the two-dimensional vessels serve more as signposts than functional containers, suggesting the impossibility of retaining everything of value.

Natalia has long been fascinated by comprehensive cultural institutions, collapsing layered representations of objects from museum collections into her paintings and textiles in order to reconsider these institutions’ alienating structures and question national identities. Her specific vessel forms were inspired by the handmade coil pots of the Jomon period of Japanese history before the existence of nation-states. Several large tapestries on view combine linen textiles (most originating in the artist’s family), paint layered to resemble flowing water, and other collaged elements, installed in patterns found around the world in basket weavings and rugs. Mixed perspectives and interrupted sequences reject a single linear narrative. The four different clays in the vessels also contribute to the work’s rich hybridity, or the sense that it could, in the words of Brown, “unfurl in every direction.”