Natalie Purschwitz: Overflow Chart

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Natalie Purschwitz, “Transpirations” (detail), 2022

carbonized plant matter, ceramics, living plants, fossilized plants and plastic, dimensions variable (courtesy Artspeak, photo by Dennis Ha)

Purschwitz: Overflow Chart

Working across a depth of materials and modes of making, Overflow Chart is an exhibition by Natalie Purschwitz. The work in Overflow Chart charts a line across a series of traces, or an imprint through various material iterations. What emerges is a blending and seeping of various processes, forms and materials.

i.

The ongoing process of collecting is an integral part of Purschwitz’s practice. Accumulated materials (natural and manufactured) are sorted and arranged via typological likeness. Purschwitz undoes these methods of collecting, sorting and arranging, through various applications that transform the materials.

ii.

These material shifts rely on an almost alchemical manipulation of elements (fire, water, air, earth) at various stages. This is evident in her processes of carbonizing plant matter to create charcoal, firing hand built ceramics, and making paper or inks from various plants and organic matter.

iii.

An element of chance remains pervasive in Overflow Chart

Through different processes of making, material configurations are determined by a particular confluence of time and place. Giving material over to the whim of an algorithm, for example, can greatly expand the horizons of particular material possibilities, rendered beyond the artist’s intent and impulse. Through GAN Artificial Intelligence programs (Artbreeder and GauGAN), selected traces of various materials, matter and form are offered to the algorithm to discern and reproduce alternative configurations. In some ways, utilizing AI in this manner does not feel dissimilar to a process of divination. A somewhat circuitous process, Purschwitz then takes the AI generated images and grounds them physically by creating drawings with ink made from organic plant matter.

iv.

What kinds of structures can support such an array of methodological approaches? Overflow Chart brings together a series of works that charts material transformations through very different apparatuses. A glimpse of the underlying serialized approach (typological and diagrammatic visual schema) is ruptured. What becomes most discernable through the works in Overflow Chart is that insight can be gained from an approach that encourages a sort of leaking, and that which cannot be contained.