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Stammering is involved when trying to categorize Natalie Cheung’s work. It’s not photography in the procedural sense, but in the chemical. The young Falls Church, VA, artist likens it to drawing, but rather than ink or graphite, she uses chemicals. And rather than deliberating over each line, she pours buckets of the chemicals on paper and lets them pool and run and dry however they may.
Cheung calls it a “mapping of the process of evaporation.” Although the lines and details are randomly wrought, they show strong, familiar patterns – the cyanotype images in her “Intermediaries” series resemble frozen lakes, rivers, and landforms as they might be seen from a satellite. Other images in the series, called chemigrams, use a similar process involving multiple chemicals on light-sensitive paper, producing an array of rich neutrals that look like, among other things, forests billowing with smoke. Several pieces reminded Cheung of specific paintings, which inspired her to ransack the art history section of the library to find out which other paintings her work accidentally resembles.
For Cheung, it all comes back to fractals – the notion that patterns are made of similar patterns, and those patterns are made of other patterns, and so on. Her passive technique allows the patterns to vividly show themselves. Rather than creating strong images, she creates “situations” where nature can create them.
There’s theory behind the images, but you don’t need to know it to like them. The galactic-looking clusters and splashy, icy topography touch on something primordial and childlike. After all, as Cheung says, “I just like blobs.”
Visit her Web site for details on where to see her work this fall.
