Natalie Guy
The Staircase, 2024, powder-coated steel and macrocarpa posts.
Italian architect Carlo Scarpa first gained prominence for renovating crumbling Venetian buildings by integrating modern materials and details—a trim of glass tiles here, a floating staircase or brass handrail there. Users felt they were moving through time as well as space. In 2022, visiting Scarpa’s projects in Venice, Natalie Guy’s attention was snagged by his staircases. She began scouring books and the internet for images, finding a design for a slender brass railing that turned a sharp 360 degrees around the corner of a stone staircase. The design, it turned out, was not by Scarpa at all, but by Act Romegialli—a contemporary-design studio founded in 1996. Guy was drawn to her moment of misrecognition as a sign of modernism’s enduring influence on architectural design. The Staircase paraphrases Act Romegialli’s handrail design as a sculptural object, invoking Scarpa’s spectre on Waiheke, where many modernist-style residencies can be found, perhaps bearing his influence without knowing it. Her staircase leads nowhere, just for show.
Natalie Guy (b.1964, Ngāpuhi, Ngāruahine) lives in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. She completed her PhD at Elam School of Fine Arts in 2022. She researches and investigates the legacy of modernist art and architecture. In 2017, she enjoyed an Asia NZ Foundation Residency in Varanasi, India, and, in 2019, a residency at Sculpture Space, Utica, NY. Her 2020 public sculpture The Pool is permanently installed in Ōtautahi/Christchurch. In 2022, her work was matched with Gavin Hipkins in the show City of Tomorrow at Tauranga Art Gallery.
