Natalya Aikens

Pleasantville, New York, U.S.

A lifelong romance with cities drives Natalya Aikens’ art. Soaring architecture, Gothic arches, and wrought-iron filigree inspire the forms which she captures using a variety of unusual materials, such as plastics and papers. Strong, graphic lines of stitched marks connect those materials with her love of fiber.

top: Dormition Cupola 12 x 12 inches, 2013 bottom: Iron Spine 2 24 x 18 inches, 2015

Tale of two cities

I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and emigrated at age 11, so I had rather romanticized memories of the city. When I went back to visit as an adult, I fell in love with the city all over again and took a gazillion photos during that visit and even more on subsequent visits. St. Petersburg is called “Venice of the North” with good reason. It has so many canals and islands and all the beautiful buildings. Its architecture really is poetry in stone, and it seemed like the perfect place for my artistic explorations.

New York City is the second city I grew up in. All my so-called formative years were spent there: junior high school in Queens, High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. I live and breathe this city. So when I felt that I had come to a resting point with my St. Petersburg series, it was just natural to continue with the architecture of my other favor- ite city. There are some architectural similarities between them of course with the older romantic buildings, but here they have those gritty fire escapes. No other city does fire escapes quite like this! And I get to play with all the mod- ern glass architecture and the gigantic iron bridges. They create such wonder- ful juxtapositions.

Photos and Photoshop

I use my photos for inspiration. I am always looking for interesting details and textures. Generally my composi- tions are put together in Photoshop. I can combine an interesting skyline with

a great rusty railing. If a detail, a building, or even a whole street scene appeals to me, I’ll take as many pictures as time allows from several angles, because I never know which one will speak to me, sometimes months later, when I am ready to make art.

Stitch and text

My process is all rather intuitive. The piece usually tells me what kind of stitching it wants. That said, I’m a bit of an instant gratification junkie, so the larger pieces are mostly machine stitched as I have a lead foot and I thread-sketch very quickly. It is very satisfying to get what is in my head out onto the surface as fast as possible. But then I like to take my time and meditate on a piece with hand stitching. On a larger work I’ll add details with hand stitching, and the smaller pieces

are usually completely hand stitched. I consider hand stitching very therapeutic and healing.

Using text is very new to me. I haven’t quite figured out my way around it yet. I do feel that the work becomes more of a statement with the use of text. It seems to drive home my points about recycling a bit more. Perhaps not very forcefully yet, but I am working up my nerve for that. I feel as though the text adds a bit of an edge to my mostly benign images.

Nontraditional materials

I don’t really consider my materials unusual; they are very basic. They are not traditional, of course. Once you play with them, plastic shopping bags, dryer sheets, papers, and plastic netting are all very fabric-like and behave similarly. You just have to remember that you can’t iron the plastic! (Although you could for a completely different effect.)

I don’t iron my plastics mainly because I worry about the fumes that they may produce; I don’t want to expose my family to unnecessary chemicals. But I thoroughly enjoy layering translucent plastic. Many people who see my plastic art think that I have painted on the surface, but I don’t need paint at all. Bags come in an amazing variety of colors, and layering them just adds to the palette. It’s a free material that otherwise would pollute our environment. I have researched our local recycling rules and it’s rather uncertain for plastic bags, so why not use them in my art instead?

There are only a few challenges that I find in working with plastic. One is that once you make a hole with the

needle, it’s there forever, and another is that when there are only a few layers, the plastic can easily rip along needle-stitched perforations. But I consider these challenges to be solved creatively. The main challenge is to try to forget the pedestrian nature of the bags and treat them as a fabric with lots of potential.

www.artbynatalya.com

above left: City Love Affair 2 52 x 19 inches, 2011 above right: Daybreak 12 x 12 inches, 2015 right: Rhetoric 40 x 40 inches, 2015