SEARCHING THROUGH ANCESTRY

Natalie Ball, Personal Home Videos Searching Through Ancestry, 2020. 

The Verbier 3-D Foundation, the Summit’s cultural partner, is a non-profit organisation dedicated to the creation of contemporary art to promote environmentalism, education, and culture to local and international audiences.

In 2021, the 3-D Foundation will experiment with a new format for their Residency Programme that will act as a response to creating art, sharing knowledge and building community during the time of social distancing: an Online Residency with Native American artist Natalie Ball. From using Instagram as a sketchbook to online open discussions and virtual happenings, the Online Residency will exist in various digital formats throughout the year, with the aim to create an easily accessible environment that allows Natalie to experiment with new forms of creating and engaging with the public. She will share her studio practice, home life and research behind the making of new work in response to current environmental and political concerns around the subject of water, which thread through both the United States and Switzerland.

Natalie works in a tradition of West Coast/California Assemblage, reminiscent of the 1970s Los Angeles Funk based free Assemblage. Through her chosen objects, attributed to indigenous identity, Natalie reassesses indigeneity as a space outside of bounded thinking: "I developed my studio practice using visual archives, history, gesture, materiality, and personal experience as the foundation to create painted textiles and sculptures as Power Objects. 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."

Natalie was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She has a Bachelor of Arts with a double major in Ethnic Studies and Art from the University of Oregon. She furthered her education in New Zealand at Massey University where she received a Master of Arts, focusing on Indigenous contemporary art. Natalie then relocated to her ancestral homelands in Chilqouin to raise her three children. She attained her Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking at Yale School of Art in 2018. 

Read more about the Verbier 3-D Foundation here. 

Click here to learn more about Natalie Ball.