Natsuki Iwamoto / ナツキ
(Take.1)
Natsuki Iwamoto translates the subconscious image-flows often in relation to the real space. Figurative drawings in a fragmented style, left on familiar surfaces like sticky notes or fabrics, is typical of her practice, along with their playful and moderate presentations.
‘Minor/alternative' languages - such as incompleteness, in-betweenness, fragility, triviality, familiarity or childishness, run through her practice. Rather avoiding linear narratives, she draws out and giving forms to fragmented, ambiguous and chaotic forms of our perception, thought, memory and desire, or to trivial reactions, murmurs, impressions and frustrations that lie dormant in the everyday life. Then she further plays with our senses through the interplay of images with the real environment, materials or processes. Characteristic ‘alternative' ways of presentation also reveal vulnerable and vibrant potentials of artifacts.
By constantly overlapping everyday images, materials, gestures and environments with imagination, the boundaries between reality/sanity and the otherworldly/absurdity are blurred. That aesthetic ultimately serves as a strategy to 'sneak' into the reality and viewers' minds.
Reffering to philosophers like Deleuze or Japanese classic aesthetic theories at the same time firmly practice-lead and through observing what emerged in the process, her practice can be a (pseudo)philosophy/psychology, and after all she seeks somewhat new visual communications.
(Take.2)
Natsuki Iwamoto is a Japanese artist whose practice addresses subconscious image-flows and their expansion into reality spaces.
In the world of the subconscious -or another level of consciousness- chaotic and fragmentary forms of perception, thoughts, memories, or desires are at work. There, usual orders are weakened, non-linear, small things murmur, emotions linger, existences go vague, and space-time is suspended. There is an intuition that the language of minor-ities, such as fragility, childishness, temporality, or in-betweenness, is their operational language, and she accesses them using it - this is reflected in the visual language and expressive strategies of her works.
Her practice is entirely based on the foundations of contemporary drawing. She considers it something that often proposes things in a primal, immature, unstable state, rendering intimate relationships between things and an artist and utilising the co-resonances between images, materials, and spaces. By being open to elements that are not only the image itself -playing with the materiality and associations of media or the rhythms among individual images and spaces, she examines the resonance of body, spirit and space and evokes a delicate and complex image experience. The works are inserted into reality and open portals to other worlds, blurring their boundaries and even intruding into the spectator's psyche.
Working and considering the level of each piece to the installation or the actions themselves, she even challenges how art can be done: how such minor but sincere acts can be presented as art and how they could be meaningful for us.