Natalie Conway is a Philadelphia-based painter returning to Fayetteville, her birthplace and longtime home, for her first solo-exhibition at Pond Gallery, Sandbox Psychology. Insisting on experimentation and play, Conway makes mysterious, object-like abstractions of remarkable spatial and material depth from discarded studio scraps. These paintings on rugged, hand-worn wooden tablets are gratifying to touch and hold; something she encourages viewers to do as part of experiencing her work. 

Conway’s paintings are characterized by their striking surfaces, caught between rare, polished geodes and cabinetmakers’ cutoffs left in the sun too long, kicked down the road a few miles. Conway layers bits of dried paint skin onto scraps of wood to begin her process of concealment and excavation, painting over the compositions before sanding the pigments back into visibility. The result is noisy, colorful, vibrating abstractions that feel as though they have been excavated from a mineral deposit. She often carries her smallest paintings in her pockets, allowing them to bump up against rings, car keys, and loose change, passively wearing down their surfaces like a human rock tumbler.

At the forefront of Conway’s practice is the oscillation between opposing modes of working and thinking. “Learning and unlearning, retaining and forgetting, retrieving and burying, reinforcing and revising—these are the processes I seek to embody through the addition and removal of paint.” Sanding a surface until it becomes smooth, even glassy, emphasizes the invisible labor and bravery required to seek—and arrive at—resolutions. It is something akin to polishing a worry stone until smooth, leaving behind a thumb-sized divot of microcosmic memories.

All this said, Conway is not restricted by process. Occasionally, language and representational imagery emerge from her abraded layers. Every now and again, the first pass is enough. For example, Rawr is a chalky line drawing of an open mouth, its teeth like stalagmites and stalactites, rendered on a black panel. The atmospheric qualities that characterize the majority of Sandbox Psychology are completely absent. Instead, the mouth boldly invites—even dares—viewers to enter the work through a playful gateway and experience variations in cadence across the exhibition.

One such shift in cadence is a table bisecting the gallery littered with small paintings. Sitting on top is an antique toolbox with the hand-painted message: FEEL FREE TO TOUCH. A unique and generous opportunity, Conway encourages viewers to handle, arrange, and play with the paintings, inviting her fellow Arkansans to become collaborators. One can’t fully experience Sandbox Psychology without taking the time to sift through Conway’s metaphorical sandbox; if you’re lucky, you may unearth something enigmatic.

Natalie Conway is a painter living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her studio practice is supported by work as a freelance tutor, which in turn complements her artistic research on the nature of learning, memory, and mental visualization. Prior to her studies at Boston University (MFA 2024), she lived 32 years in her hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas. A childhood spent observing livestock and creek beds led to adolescent obsessions with chemistry and cognitive science. After receiving her BA in Psychology and Philosophy in 2012, she stuck around the University of Arkansas for several additional years to learn how to be an artist. Plein air painting at the Mount Gretna School of Art (2014) and conceptual rigamarole at the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art (2015) further equipped her to study the nature of thought via studio art methodology, as she continued to do throughout her stint as a teacher at Fayetteville High School (2017-2022).