Wednesday Talks // Nat Penney

Join us for a casual Wednesday Talk with Nat Penney.

Nat Penney is an artist/fabricator who combines an obsession for labour intense metal fabrication and timberwork processes with found and formed objects. She takes a lot from her daily job fabricating for others, seeing the work and the art as completely intertwined, with both supporting each other through conversations and concentrated material engagement. 

Her practice involves searching for pleasing points of interconnectedness between the unfamiliar and familiar, often resulting in playful sculptural assemblages with kinetic moments that offer an exchange of structured absurdity. She enjoys considering the subconscious impulses in objects and how we can feel decisive about their role and placement without there being an actual system to follow.

She often incorporates materials weighted heavily in nostalgia, such as tiles from her childhood bathroom or her parents’ wooden tennis racquets, embedding personal histories into sculptural objects. These materials act as carriers of memory, yet memory and nostalgia themselves are malleable and sometimes irresponsible, reshaping perception and altering what we take to be truth. This uncertainty around truth is smoothed out within the absurdist moments she presents, as they engage in futile motion and maybe make you smirk.

Nat is a co-Director of fab workshop in Kent Town, where she works and has her studio.