The work of Natalie Draz
One of the greatest things about being an artist, is all of the other artists I know that I get to share ideas with, collaborate with, or in the case of Natalie, become a sculpture for.
Natalie's doing a super cool project working with people and place. She takes high quality photos like this-
Then she walks around the neighbourhood of that person and takes pictures of buildings that are important to them. After her image gathering she meticulously prints and cuts paper sculptures of the buildings interacting with the image of the subject.
In the words of Natalie-
"What is your neighbourhood? The chaotic sprawl of urban skylines and alleyways is captured in the pop-up sculptures of ‘Terra Cognita’ – known land, marked territory, the many pieces of a person’s intimate geography they hold as the buildings closest to their hearts. ‘Terra Cognita’ is an ongoing series of photographic documentation of the neighbourhoods people create around themselves. Each person’s personal Montreal was collected by Natalie Draz through a series of meetings and neighbourhood walks. As the body physically unfolds it reveals through photographs a visual kinetic document of the navigation of a single person through her or his personal map of Montreal.
Using photography, papercutting and paper engineering as both sculptural elements and a documentary practice,Terra Cognita captures the iconic architecture that becomes a person’s intimate mythology of their space - the liminal place between the interior self and the exterior neighbourhoods of personal geography. Inspired by medieval mythology of sleeping giants and defeated dragons forming the hills upon which towns are built, each of the people becomes the landscape upon which their cartographic identity extends from."
And what I'm listening to today-