About
Ishbel explores the cryptic and hyperreal in their work as her paintings become vessels. She centre queerness using painting to define undefined things and investigates tensions between the known and unknown. Ishbel examines categories and classifications by blending materiality using both painted and real objects as interventions in her work, creating ‘illusionisms’ that challenge boundaries. Playfulness is central to her practice, especially in material exploration and she uses painting as a medium to capture the instability of these materials.
Currently, Ishbel is making work about an artefact called ‘witch in a bottle’, found in 1915 and held in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. She is using balloons and geo-magnets to physically reconstruct and reimagine this object in different iterations of paint and sculptural works.
Ishbel engages with tension and contradictions between freedom and restriction, containment and release. What does it mean to ‘bottle up’ emotions, to repress your own identity, or to hold onto trauma? Hyperreal painted renderings of cryptic objects invite the eerie into the viewing experience, recalling horror tropes, folklore and speculative worlds. The use of painting becomes a paradoxical act of archiving and activation. It legitimises, offers form to the unfixed and renders visible the often unseen. Ishbel’s work reimagines objects not as passive symbols, but as active participants in queerness.