Photomanipulation nominee

This image is from the series "Merkaba: Vehicle of Light", an ongoing citizen science project which explores the biodiversity and ecology within a 1 km radius around my house in Johannesburg.
For the zoological elements, I work with found skeletal objects of indigenous wildlife, from which the narratives grow. For the rest I work with my own collection of fresh and pressed botanical samples, as well as insects that are collected upon their natural demise. Photographs of the specimen are captured both in the studio and in-situ, deconstructed and transformed into hyper collages that illustrate the connections between fauna and flora and the cataclysmic implications of the loss of biodiversity; not only for humans, but for the Natural World.

Natalie Field (1982) is a multi-disciplinary artist from South Africa currently researching living materials as medium for her Master’s in Fine Art at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Norway.

With a B.Tech Photography Cum Laude from the Nelson Mandela University (Port Elizabeth, ZA, 2008), the artist participated in several group exhibitions in Port Elizabeth before relocating to Johannesburg in 2011. Field attended her first artist residency at the Arteles Creative Center in Finland in 2016, culminating in Human.Nature, her first solo show with Berman Contemporary in 2018. The artist went on to exhibit with the gallery at the START Art Fair in London in 2019. Field has also received several awards, most recently winning Gold for her series The Hole in your Soul in the Photo-Manipulation Category of the Fine Art Photography Awards, 2021.

Since her move to Europe in 2021, Field has exhibited at Shapes of Living: Living Earth at the Italgas Heritage Lab in Turin, Italy; and K-U-K (Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst) in Trondheim, Norway. Most recently she attended a summer workshop at Rejmyre Art Lab in Sweden.