Fine Art nominee

Their Lives in Our Hands is a site-responsive series of large-scale photographic prints on textile, depicting small lifeless woodland critters cradled in human hands: a gesture of mourning, intimacy, and responsibility. Installed outdoors, the work collaborates with the elements, as translucent images shift with wind and light, emerging and dissolving like apparitions. Frozen moments in time become living surfaces exploring the fragile relationship between human and more-than-human lives.

The work offers an embodied encounter with grief and the complex multi-species entanglements that shape our shared existence, asking how those lives that live closest to us are so often rendered invisible, disposable, or othered. And to consider the consequences of our actions.

The work is accompanied by the poem "Becoming Earth".

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.