Bundanon

Lives / works: Hardys Bay, Central Coast, Darkinjung country

Nathalie Hartog-Gautier is constantly searching through archives, memories and landscapes looking for new ways to ‘see’ as an artist. This process of scanning allows her to uncover unique connections between seemingly disparate elements that are in turn unified by her own major themes and preoccupations to depict nature in a new light – as if seen for the first time. Botany is used as a metaphor to explore distant and recent history, like man, nature also travels, colonises and kills. What is collectable in one culture becomes a parasite in another.

Using different techniques, she offers a physical and conceptual journey, questioning the topics of the encounter, the collecting, as well as the memory and the identity.

In residence at Bundanon

Nathalie Hartog-Gautier’s journey from France to Australia has generated in her a set of interpretations that she brings into her work.

The river inspires her to experiment with different surfaces, mediums and handmade paper, to represent its mood and the nature of its penetration of the landscape. During her residency she will experiment with continuous drawing to tell the stories of the river, a form of writing, expressing an array of emotional response through pattern, composition and form, using natural elements from the river alluding to its dark past history, the footsteps left behind by the colonisation of the land.