Artist statement

Embedded within us are precepts from the past which consciously or unconsciously influence our current behavior. My work explores the matrix of social behavior to bring to light these hidden rules and to examine their current validity. Discontinuities between observed reality and the ideals represented by American myths about family and gender roles fascinate me. Humor and irony become tools for the exploration of serious themes. In much of my work I transform, pervert or use ordinary domestic objects in unexpected ways. Manipulation of material from everyday life transmutes the ordinary into the extraordinary, often with ironic overtones. I use traditional women’s domestic skills, such as sewing and needlepoint, on untraditional material, like metal and wire cloth. I pursue the tension between the material, the means of crafting, the aesthetically beautiful outcome and the questioning content. –Natalie Kutner, who died of Parkinson's Disease in April 2014.     

Curator Statement

"Her work is revelatory – demonstrating not only a mastery of a wide range of mediums – painting, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking – but more importantly, a rigorously intelligent and highly personal responsiveness to the major movements in the art of the past fifty years – particularly the feminist theory and practice that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The political, emotional and transgressive nature of feminist cultural production of that time is still the subject of lively debate and still strongly influences artists – not all of them female – whose practice is rooted in appreciation for the hidden, the forgotten, the repressed, the ignored." –Simon Zalkind