Based in Lisbon, Natalie Woolf is an artist who works mainly with the drawn line: Combining still and moving images including painting and drawing on paper, on film and into site specific spaces. Exploring, across various media, the imprint and the gesture, or as Tim Ingold terms it the trace and the thread (2015:42) that can transgress the void between viewer and the viewed. Her fascination with the moving image and visual communication has driven her creative practice and research to explore analogue and digital technologies, from images that change just because of the angle of view, to prototypes for touch responsive materials and projection technologies, culminating in 2D and 3D works; installations, explorations and projects that can be described as expanded drawing.
Since graduating with a BA in Painting from Leeds Metropolitan University (Leeds Beckett) she continued her fine art approach alongside commercial design practices for 12 years, exhibiting internationally - touring to Switzerland, Japan and Hong Kong. Her design work has been selected for exhibition at The Crafts Council UK and USA and for 100% Design in the UK. In 1999 she paused to complete a PhD at the Royal College of Art, London. Subsequently establishing a freelance consultancy in public arts as an artist and consultant that drew on her PhD research on responsive materials for sites of physical and material engagement. Commercially and practically, she combined her fine art practice with creative thinking to consider engagement and inclusivity in the public realm for public and private urban development and for local authority regeneration projects. Moving to Lisbon in 2010 she is a member of Atelier Concorde where she continues to develop her painting and expanded drawing across media, and also works as a Professor in both the Animation and Design Departments at Universidade Lusófona combining drawing practices with still and moving images encompassing expanded and experimental drawing, and hybrid spaces that move beyond screen based media. Natalie Woolf is an integrated researcher at the Centre for Other Worlds (COW) DELLI Design Program at Universidade Lusófona |
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Personal creative interests range widely from biology, ecology and human histories intertwined the land, to technology that supports and expands human engagement within what can be broadly explained as drawing, in and out of motion. Specific research revolves around Expanded Drawing, organized around ideas to travers media: the line, the link between hand and eye that tugs at the viewer, as the embodiment of the act of making. There are many ways to describe the same thing, through film, dance, writing and particularly drawing or illustrating. When we add the term expanded, we attempt to break known, accepted or traditional boundaries of practice, whilst harnessing the visceral and tangible act of making to transmit bodily knowledge alongside the visual expression of that experience Current research subjects include: • Drawing Territories: Mediated Location And The Materialities Of Now, which includes taught classes in the Design Communication Course at Lusófona, TRANSITOS and LOCA Walking Arts research topics at the Centre for other Worlds (COW/DELLI Lusofona) and a forthcoming collaborative exhibition with co-researchers. • AH-HA while we wait, Animations for Health and Wellbeing in a Hospital Environment • CBIOS residency art and science collaboration |
Natalie is a permanent resident at Atelier Concorde
in Lisbon, Portugal
in Lisbon, Portugal