Through my work, which I equally generate through digital and traditional processes, I ask questions about relationships: line, surface, shape and dimensionality.
Through my work, which I equally generate through digital and traditional processes, I ask questions about relationships: line, surface, shape and dimensionality. I am interested in the plane as a spatial quality, in exploring space through the engagement of the hand, and in the narrative structure or ‘color’ when the concrete meets the indefinite. My starting point is often the quality of the plane, and the beauty of the incidental and the everyday. However, it is important to me to work through the slow process of looking, making and changing, instead of through an initially established concept. Looking needs processing for quite a while before I am able to engage my hand. Looking to me is like a peeling activity, in which I strip the gaze. During this process, I create drawings on paper responding to the actual space, in which they are created, until certain site-specific themes evolve. Those drawings, composed through looking indirectly rather than directly, referencing the environment seen, form a context of video and installation. The more openly my drawings laugh at me, the better they open up the context. My work attempts to address the charged gap between the dimensions and to unfold the beauty of its fragility. I conceive this gap as a kind of ‘active’ and flexible space that allows areas of contraction and expansion-compositionally as well as timewise. The installation is decentralized—it refers to the overall composition and the spaces in between the media, rather than to the individual elements and their meaning. I am interested in to what extent media can act as a drawing in space, and how the media interferes with one another to create a pulsing new ‘order.’ The concrete renders the indefinite and vice versa. Each media orders, examines and acts as a departure of one another. I am searching for the directness of things despite their silence, enabling a gaze for the unseeable.
Natascha Ampunant received her MA in Studio Art/Electronic Media fron the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She received her undergraduate degree in Communication Design from the University of Applied Science in Krefeld, Germany and also studied at the University of Dundee, Scotland. She has won numerous prizes for her quiet, lyrical videos. Ampunant creates installations using video as a major component to engage the viewer in an active relationship with her work and the space in which it is shown.