Letter
Graphite on paper, 21 x 33 cm, 2025
Artwork Statement
Natalie H. Reed’s artistic practice delves into the unresolved terrain of identity, spectacle, and the construction of self through time. Her works function as both installations and performative spaces—sites where absence is materialised and the illusion of presence is questioned. Drawing upon personal and inherited experiences, Reed explores how identity may not emerge from direct memory, but from nostalgia, fabrication, or longing for an alternate self.
Through repetition, spatial theatricality, and carefully staged forms, her practice articulates themes of melancholy and camp—tethered to the idea of the alter ego and the idealised self that never fully arrives. Reed’s recent work interrogates the notion that what we express may not belong to us at all, but is instead shaped by past spectacles, cultural illusions, and anachronistic longing. Her art thus becomes an elegy to what was, what is, and what never quite came to be.
Artist Bio
Natalie H. Reed is a Melbourne-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice investigates the construction of identity through documentation, appropriation, ritual, and spatial installation. Her work often takes the form of large-scale sculpture and repetitious imagery, drawing from theories of the spectacle, object relations, melancholy, and absence. Reed’s practice is driven by a fascination with the performance of selfhood—particularly the tension between the lived, the inherited, and the imagined.
She holds a Master of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts (2024), a Graduate Certificate in Public Art from Monash University (2021), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours in Sculpture, 2010). Her work has been recognised through multiple awards, including the National Gallery of Victoria Trustee Scholarship, the Substation Award, and the NGV Women’s Association Award, among others. With a strong foundation in theory and material experimentation, Reed creates emotionally charged installations that blur the boundaries between presence and absence, theatre and memory.
