You usually bury the head in the woods Trophy Head

Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc), You usually bury the head in the woods Trophy Head, 2021. Neon glass, extension cord, cow bone, shoe, deer hooves, beads, bullet case, elk hide, 28 × 12 1/8 × 14 5/8 in.

Previously on View

Sadie Coles HQ,62 Kingly Street, London, W1

WHAT DO YOU SEE, YOU PEOPLE, GAZING AT ME

Nov 16, 2021–Jan 29, 2022

(Shared by Natalie via email to Amelia Sept 2023:)

Bio:

Natalie Ball was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She has a Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Indigenous, Race & Ethnic Studies & art from the University of Oregon. She furthered her education in Aotearoa (NZ) at Massey University where she attained her Master’s degree with a focus on Indigenous contemporary art. Ball then relocated to her ancestral Homelands in Southern Oregon/Northern California to raise her three children. In 2018, Natalie earned her M.F.A. degree in Painting & Printmaking at Yale School of Art. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of the 2023 United States Artist Fellowship, the 2023 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, the Ford Family Foundation’s Hallie Ford Foundation Fellow 2020, the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant 2020, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2019. Natalie Ball is now an elected official serving on the Klamath Tribes Tribal Council.

Artist Statement:

Through auto-ethnography, I attempt to move "Indian" outside of governing discourses to offer a visual genealogy that refuses to line up with the many constructed existences of Native Americans. I map personal and historical landscapes, allowing them to travel through generations, engaging the history of violence, dispossession, and survivance while filling in gaps and forging stories to hold space for new complex narratives to exist. To disrupt mainstream definitions of Indian with personal, community, and US histories that reflect the complexity of Native American lives, like my own, is to better understand ourselves, the nation, and necessarily our shared experiences and histories.

Artist Link