Natalie Porthole
11’ x 20’ x 12’
Recycled tent frames, holographic sticker
2017
2017 Artist Intern
Artist Statement
What differentiates one place from the next space? How are they confined physically and how is the separation of here to there perceived? Natalie Porthole highlights the transformation we go through when we enter into and through. What happens to her and him and you and us once past the threshold?
She is a spangled mirage seen from afar. Her appeal is an instinctual attraction- is that the glisten of water in the distance? A fraudulent phantasm. She’ll draw you in and spit you out, for she is a portal port-hole siren to another dimension.
CornHub
8’ x 2’ 10” x 2’ 10”
Cast iron, fabricated steel
2017
2017 Hot Metal Artists
Artist Statement
Facets of space, place, community, and commodity heavily influence the work and Heidi as a maker. This incites a movement in her practice, and the continuous pulse has been a driving force behind her work post graduation. With new places, she’s able to investigate industry of the area and accumulate site specific refuse. Material energy is questioned, as well as its connectedness to her and him and you and us.
Growing up, Heidi’s playground was six hundred fifty acres of dirt, cows, corn, and rust in Solon, Iowa. Being surrounded by large machinery, expansive landscapes, mass quantities of crop, and witnessing the migration of this crop from field, to wagon, to bin, to semi has influenced the way she goes about scale, movement, and renewal.
On the farm, the exaggeration of time and rapid cycles of life and death are witnessed firsthand. Vast expanses of crop and livestock are grown and harvested year after year. Large quantities of material are vigorously used for months, then discarded or replaced. Denying its impotence, Heidi’s work examines the afterlife and potential of this residual material. Through play with the material’s physical qualities, its aesthetic and conceptual value begins to be redefined based on her perception of life cycles and regeneration, fertilization and insemination, movement and sentiment. Heidi uses sculptural assemblage and installation as platforms to abstract industrial detritus from its former utility and find a rediscovered relevance within the refuse.
Heidi Zenisek
Born: Iowa City, IA, USA, 1993
Resides: College Park, MD, USA
Education
MFA, University of Maryland College Park, 2021
MA, Eastern Illinois University, 2018
BFA, University of Iowa, 2015