Natalie Dunham doesn’t just build art—she builds systems. Patterns. Repetitions. Forms that feel both obsessive and meditative. Her practice sits somewhere between sculpture and drawing, though nothing she creates could be called a sketch in the casual sense. Her work is layered, literal, and precise—yet it still hums with something quiet and human beneath the surface.
Dunham earned her BFA in painting from Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama in 2007. Not long after, she shifted toward three-dimensional forms, completing her MFA in sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010. Since then, she’s exhibited widely across the U.S. and abroad. Today, she keeps studios on two continents—one in the U.S., another in Europe—maintaining a practice that’s both geographically mobile and formally grounded.
What makes her work stand out isn’t just the form. It’s the process. Dunham is a process-based artist in the clearest sense. Her materials—often humble, repetitive, minimal—are chosen not for their prestige but for what they can do under the pressure of accumulation. She builds up. She stacks, wraps, compresses. Simple forms—lines, cylinders, curves—recur like a kind of visual mantra. There’s nothing decorative or spontaneous in these constructions. They’re deliberate. Calculated. And that’s exactly where their emotional resonance comes in.
Take No. 6.2231.20 [5C]—the piece in question. On first glance, it’s a monochrome wall work: six vertical black columns, made of what looks like stacked and folded black material. But the longer you look, the more your perception starts to shift. Each column appears nearly identical at first, but subtle differences in curvature, shadow, and compression begin to emerge. The folds aren’t rigid—they breathe slightly. The surface seems to shimmer, textured with fine dust or glittering granules, catching light in irregular ways. What looks industrial from afar feels strangely intimate up close.
The material seems soft but dense, something fabric-like or synthetic. There’s a rhythm to the way each loop nests into the next—like a kind of visual breathing, or the undulation of muscle beneath skin. The fact that it’s black-on-black only deepens the effect. There are no loud colors or dramatic gestures, just the quiet repetition of form doing its work. The sculpture becomes a kind of visual metronome—each segment marking time.
Dunham doesn’t name her works in the usual way. She uses numbers—each piece assigned a unique sequence. This isn’t just a cataloging system. It’s a record. A ledger of intent. Each number marks a point in her practice—what materials were used, how they were arranged, what methods she applied. There’s no romantic title, no metaphor baked into the name. Instead, the viewer is invited to connect directly with the object, not an interpretation.
That said, interpretation is still part of the experience. Her work opens a door, even if it doesn’t push you through it. There’s something physical about encountering these pieces in person—especially the larger ones. They stand off the wall like ribs or columns. They call attention to gravity, to density, to space. But they also invite slowness. You can’t take in a Dunham piece in a glance. It asks you to look longer, to notice the minor shifts between one fold and the next, to trace the shape your eye wants to follow.
Her European and American studios allow her to keep the work in motion. Materials vary, but the sensibility stays consistent. Minimal. Structured. Committed to process. There’s no improvisation here, but there’s still discovery. Dunham seems to trust that repetition doesn’t dull creativity—it sharpens it.
What makes her practice compelling is this tension between control and surrender. She controls the system, the materials, the shape. But the work—especially when built from pliable, textured materials—takes on a life of its own. Edges don’t stay perfect. Shadows shift. The human hand makes itself known in the irregularity of the folds. The process shows.
In many ways, Dunham’s work asks: What does it mean to make the same gesture over and over again, slightly different each time? What accumulates in that process? Is it labor? Memory? Aesthetic logic? Or something more elusive?
There’s no single answer. That’s part of the point. The repetition doesn’t tell you what to think. It gives you space to notice what you feel. For a practice rooted in geometry and process, Dunham’s work ends up feeling surprisingly alive. Not loud. Not showy. But present. Exact. And quietly resonant.
