THE FOCUS View all posts from The Focus

I direct the audience’s attention to the interaction of past and present voices that have been both for and against movements of social justice and equality by integrating their words with my photographs. This intermingling symbolizes the collision of knowledge, memory and controversy with personal experience. It is a reckoning of the elusive present with the enigmatic past (and vice versa).

The world that we have created today allows me as black woman to exercise my First Amendment freedoms – one of the many freedoms that dominant groups have denied minorities to this day. I am choosing to actively use my freedoms to confront and resist the national practice of physical and systemic domination of minorities. I hope to use this freedom to make comments, arguments, and critiques of these systems of oppression. To do this I re-share narratives that I feel the Western world has heard but has not yet learned.

To “re-share” these narratives, I extract from literature, history, and the media appropriated text and images to incorporate into my own body of work. The wording often wraps around the contours of the portrait emulating the characteristics of the skin and muscle that compose the features of our faces. The text often saturates the whole image stacking narrative on top of narrative to allude to an argument or call and response.

– Natalie Eddings, August 2018

Natalie Eddings is a Memphis-based artist who earned her Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography at the University of Memphis. Using photography as her tool for seeking truth and creating beauty, Eddings works primarily with themes of trauma, healing, and conversation.

Eddings produced a collaborative photo-sculptural installation called Object (n)/ Object (v)at the University of Memphis Box Gallery (2017), at the Memphis Area Women’s Council Headquarters (2017), and the University of Memphis Rose Theater in honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month (2018) which confronted the epidemic of trauma and sexual assault.

She has also been featured in a group show at Rhodes College called Liberation (2018) hosted by The Collective. At the end of April 2018, she presented the culmination of her thesis work at the Martha and Robert Fogelman Galleries of the University of Memphis along with fellow colleagues. One the works from her thesis was presented by Deborah Willis during her lecture on her book, Posing Beauty (2018). Eddings’s work was also featured in Best of Memphis, a group exhibition, hosted by Box Gallery (2018).

Eddings’s photograph, Hand Rose, was recently featured in the Fifth Annual Art of the South exhibition. She is also preparing for the November 2018 solo exhibition called Press where she continues her exploration of vicarious intergenerational, racial trauma.

* select images courtesy of the artist