SOLD - 19. Natalie Draz - "Telephone Pole: Holding Me Upright" - 12x12"

It's too far to hear your voice in the wind.

Telephone wires are heavy with the weight of the words they're constantly transmitting. The mass medium of communicating, held together with copper and plastic, also holds together so much of my life. The structural pole sits firmly, holding upright the thin wires and all the endless voicemails and messages we send through such seemingly flimsy lines.

I've been thinking about what happens to solitary telephone poles, left to go feral in a field or having become obsolete or redundant. Would the telephone wires sag down, no longer powered by the frisson of electricity. Or would they seek new lines and new routes? When is the sum of the words shared by two people enough to let the line go silent? How much can be pared away from the pole until it's a skeleton of its old self - a disconnected form?

I'm drawn to the lines of both telephone poles and their wires both as an artist and specifically as a papercutter. Papercutting is inherently a destructive practice.

I make a drawing of firm lines and then I reduce it to thin paper pieces holding together enough to create a shape out of absence - a shape of dissection, a line drawing becoming a physical object that now answers to structural integrity and gravity. The fragility of the papercut telephone pole sits in stark contrast to the thick twine and metal nails holding the telephone pole firmly to its wooden panel.

With a BA in metropolitan anthropology and an MFA in print media, Natalie Draz spends much of her time walking, photographing, and sketching the city to become architectural characters in her papercut cityscapes.