Author: natalyacritchley

Bournemouth, England, 1963. Studied at Central School of Art and Design, London. Lived in Venezuela from 1981-2016. Currently resides in MI, USA. Artist of English origin who came to Venezuela looking for light at 18, and ended up living for two decades in Puerto Ordaz (an industrial city on the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroni rivers with the brightest light on earth) and consequently developed a body of work based on this monumental industrial park and the ever growing city. Through constant repetition, the originally very figurative images were synthesized into an alphabet of symbols derived from elements and structures in the surroundings with which to subsequently rewrite the landscape. Through this abstract language I could finally embrace a revision of the female figure, and in increasingly narrative work, explore the broken balance of ecology in the masculine world of manufacturing. After moving to Caracas in 2000 social art projects became an ever increasing counterpart to painting especially after a commission to draw the construction of a cablecar in the San Agustín del Sur hillside barrio. Since 2015 coordinates MAPEA, a group of activists, actors and architects drawn together to carry out workshops that include walkabouts, corporal expression and painting in an attempt to look at the city, it’s patterns and our evolving relationship with the urban environment.

Crookedfield says Hi to Henry Hair Mattress: part 3

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This exhibition has a retrospective character going back over 30 years of work, and shows something of the process of synthesizing the landscape to evolve into an abstract alphabet. Through Victor Fuenmayor’s critical text we can follow the process of the developing abstract alphabet and the reconstruction of this landscape with these symbols.

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Over-impressions

Víctor Fuenmayor, Maracaibo, November 25, 2016

Initially I perceive in Natalya Critchleys work (England 1963) a spatial disorder that draws me in as I unravel a code of signs that combine as text, articulating unusual ways of perceiving the urban and industrial landscape. All true creation begins with a deconstruction or creative destruction that leads us to create new ways of writing and new readings. Natalya Critchley invents a new landscape, recreating it imaginatively, which prompts a search for her codes for reading.

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Crookedfield says hi to Henry Hair Mattress: part 2

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Natalya Critchley (Crookedfield)

Jimmy Yánez, Exhibition Curator, November 26, 2016

Whether the creation starts with an alphabet constructed from a spatial vision of the urban and natural landscape, or a web of forms and colours like a carpet, Natalya Critchley creates a unique poetic model from her texts.

As we are dealing with a retrospective exhibition, we will show this creative model in variety of media and materials throughout her career, with a convergence of forms in a constant crisscrossing of lines, like maps where we can imagine her writing with letters from her alphabet, an intercrossing of threads and metaphors repeated in her textual creation between geographical reference and the unique imaginary existent in the artists epoch.

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Crookedfield says Hi to Henry Hair Mattress

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The name of my exhibition at Maczul (Museum of Contemporary Art, Maracaibo, Venezuela) opening on Saturday 26th of November refers to my longstanding admiration for Henri Matisse as something of an insider joke. Henry Hair Mattress was the name which Chicago students christened him with in their protest against the 1913 Armory Show, which travelled from New York to Chicago and where 80% of the city came to see this scandalous exhibition of modern art. Crookedfield is a rendition of my surname.

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Vintage Kalamazoo 3: hats

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I can’t keep my eyes off these wonderful hats from the 40’s at JBird Vintage, so what else to do but….start painting them! Apparently it was the one thing that people were still creative with during the wartime since clothes were kept very simple and functional.    Also a couple more houses from the historic Stuart district and Michigan Avenue downtown.

 

 

And back to Kalamazoo: Wall St

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On arriving I was lucky enough to take over a vegetable plot in the Wall St Community Garden. At two blocks from where I’m living it’s near enough to feel like a back garden to get out to when you’ve been at the screen all day and I inherited sage, kale and raspberries. Starting in July was a bit late to do much planting, but it feels like I just got to do the nice bit which was the picking and eating.

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Murals in the Market: Detroit

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Last but not least a few images from the Murals in the Market event last Friday in Detroit, an event that has grown exponentially in the last two years. The amount of people there was incredible and the murals impressive, although we come from a place where graffiti is a bit old hat having been co-opted for a political cause. Financing the medium encouraged exploration and Venezuelan tags and murals are much more creative than many I’ve seen abroad, but this is definitely more ambitious in scale and scope and not obliged to serve as propaganda. In fact the murals really make the most of what could be a devastated urban landscape and convert it into an open air museum.

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MOCAD Detroit

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So we finally made our way down Woodward Avenue past the motorways and construction sites to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. The main show by a Detroit artist called Sanford Biggers was Subjective Cosmology, described as an “unseen world made visible”. At first glimpse it could be the parallel worlds that people of different colour and ethnicity seem to inhabit here, as someone observed, it’s a room full of corpses, and as a comment all too pertinent in the exhibition text with the “continued killings of unarmed black civilians by the police”.

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Downtown Detroit

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Turning the corner on our way downtown from the Heidelberg project was this beauty of a building all boarded up and awaiting rescue. The mix of styles from Art Deco to Neogothic is almost whimsical in many buildings dotted around and a testament to the tremendous energy and creative freedom that must have existed in the city’s heyday. And so very different in feel from Europe, I was particularly struck by a church that seemed to use gothic and islamic in one go and was Pentecostal in denomination. Downtown we caught a quick glimpse of wonderful stone carved skyscrapers while looking for galleries that were shut and decided to make our way up to MOCAD. Even though a light rail is just being installed (we saw a train speeding by but were told later it must have been a trial run) it’s not particularly friendly to pedestrians as we found wandering down Woodward Avenue. Maybe too much to ask of a city which was (is?) the epitome of the automobile culture, and still has a way to go reinventing itself in that sense. Definitely a long way before I’d be comfortable cycling around the expansive motorways. There are civic minded details that we appreciated though like the outdoor reading room at the library…

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