Local artist Natalie Bork brings a unique blend of sculpture and abstract painting to the Student Union Art Gallery in the exhibit “Battuto: Letting Go of Memories or Revealing?”
The display opens Monday, Feb. 12, and will run through Monday, March 4. A public artist reception is scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m., Feb. 12, in the gallery’s atrium.
“Battuto” is an Italian word that means "struck" or "beaten" and refers to the process of carving into glass. Bork’s featured sculpture series explores carving into the surface of forms, revealing the history of “paint skins” or the piece’s layers. “These surfaces are built by accumulating and manipulating layers of acrylic paint to represent both skin and time,” said Bork, who uses her work to explore a struggle between “maintaining control and releasing it”—in both life and art.
“When creating the paint skins and developing the relationship between the skins and the forms,” Bork explained, “the entire process consists of adding and subtracting. If the paint skins appear too polished and perfect, I deliberately create cracks in them by physically ripping them apart.”
Bork also gouges, scrapes, scores and carves her paint skins with wood and linoleum tools. “It is a cycle that ceases only when the piece is completed.”
A nationally certified fine arts teacher at Charlotte Country Day School, Bork earned a Master of Fine Art with a concentration in painting from Winthrop University. Her contemporary art style is well-known through the Charlotte metro area and is emerging in several other cities.