Natalie Rae Good lives and works in New Mexico. She is interested in time, its passage and traces left behind, the earth's natural cycles, maps, memory. Natalie works in print, clay, and performance and enjoys making all sorts of objects that attempt to bear witness / collect record of brief moments in the earth’s own daily self-reinvention.
Natalie has shown drawings, prints, and sculptural installations in venues in New York, Virginia, Oregon, Michigan, New Mexico, and Ohio. She has participated in projects with the Moving Crew artists group and has collaborated with Rob Andrews for performances at Exit Art, RUSH Arts, and English Kills in New York. She teaches workshops in cyanotype and letterpress and runs a custom letterpress printing business, Etc. Letterpress.
Natalie was the 2019-2020 Artist In Residence in the Ceramics Department at Western New Mexico University. She has been awarded residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center.
Natalie has worked at various arts institutions including the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX, David Zwirner in New York, NY, Star Axis in Las Vegas, NM, and Holt/Smithson Foundation in Santa Fe, NM where she currently acts as Collection Manager and Registrar. She continues to work as an art handler, courier, exhibit designer, and shipping coordinator for traveling exhibitions around the country.
In Natalie’s lamp works, waste is used to generate beauty—or better— power, to elevate and reintegrate objects formerly hidden away. Here, florescent fixtures once found in millions of households hidden under frosted glass shades are transformed into new social positions as lamps. No longer hidden away under the hoods of stoves across the globe (a sign of anonymous labor), they are freed of their fungibility and transformed into design objects by whose light a book might be read or conversation might be had, finding their place at the center rather than the margins of life.
Natalie Rae Good’s ceramic chain mail compositions address the complicated nature of possession and power. Here, traditional weaving techniques from the Middle Ages are suspended from forged iron hooks. The chains themselves hold a multiplicity of contradictory meanings: in one sense bonding implies protection, mutuality, strength; in another, restriction, and punishment. Here traditional chainmail links present as strong and protective though they are made of frangible materials, barely able to hold their own weight. Such is the illusionary yet powerful nature of control, domination, social hierarchies, as well as security and unity. Things often are not what they seem. There is inherent fragility in all human projects and these ceramic meditations shed light on these truths.
The cyanotypes represented here are records of transient moments and act as a visual memory of a plant’s shadow come and gone. These images are made in the wild and are not manipulated. In many of the works from this series, the movement of the objects in range creates a completely obscured image. They are made ethereal by each gust of wind and angle of sun.
Seen / Salt Flats is a series of large transfers (22 X 30, 30X40 on Rives BFK) produced by collaging hundreds of screenshots produced by Google Satellite of the area surrounding the Bonneville Salt Flats.
Transfers are partnered with packets which articulate the fragmenting influence of technology on our understanding of cartography and space.
Fern / Sun Dial is an ongoing project wherein a frond’s shadow in painted repeatedly, on the hour, as the sun moves through a window.