NATHALIE ALFONSO

b. 1987, Colombia

Line Across the Field Unfolding the Line, 2020

Video Still (White cloth on landscape)

Courtesy of the artist

Nathalie Alfonso produces artworks that present notions of invisible labor, repetition, and endurance. While these artistic gestures often take place in the public sphere, Alfonso’s works examine the intimate and internal domains of domestic work and the female body.

In the artist’s words:

Line Across the Field, (Unfolding the Line) filmed in Corsicana, TX, I cut and sewed together one thousand feet of white fabric that was wound around a wooden stick in order to facilitate the unfolding and folding of the line. Using a drone to record my movements, I repeated walks randomly within the camera’s frame, or from point A to point B. After several attempts, I started to recognize similar patterns produced by the movements of my body and hand in comparison to the previous drawings made on the paper. This brought me to consider the notions of “the body” vs. “my body”. In this iteration, it was important the body wasn’t perceived as my body, but as a body moving across an open field of space. The bird’s eye view intentionally blurred the body unfolding the line of fabric, and further blurred the boundaries between gender, race, and physical appearance, giving the focal point to the expansion of the white line. I accepted the hand and the body as the drawing tool and recognized the urge to expand those gesture drawings beyond the scale of my body.