My work aims to uncover certain ambiguities around human experience. Those that have to do with memory, like certain untruths and remembrances that are located in the past, juxtaposed with the images and narratives of the imagination. Often the thing that I am in search of is intangible and elusive, lurking somewhere between not yet known and the forgotten.

There is a slippage between the types of environments that are proposed in the work. Are they suggestive of the domestic space of the home, or a public context such as a museum, or retail settling?

I think about those who come to view the work, and position them as subject – an interlocutor – within these environments. These observers have stumbled upon a setting of intimacy; an interior landscape that guards the self as something to be protected from the outside – casting us into a misremembered past, or an uncertain future.

Isabel English

what we were or might be

she/her

'what we were or might be', 2022

'what we were or might be', 2022

'what we were or might be', 2022, 75 x 170cm

'what we were or might be', 2022, 75 x 170cm

'what we were or might be', 2022, 100 x 250cm. Photo Credit: Kate-Bowe O'Brien

'what we were or might be', 2022, 100 x 250cm. Photo Credit: Kate-Bowe O'Brien

'what we were or might be', 2022. Photo Credit: Kate-Bowe O'Brien

'what we were or might be', 2022. Photo Credit: Kate-Bowe O'Brien

'what we were or might be', 2022, 100 x 250cm. Photo Credit: Kate-Bowe O'Brien

'what we were or might be', 2022, 100 x 250cm. Photo Credit: Kate-Bowe O'Brien

'what we were or might be', 2022

'what we were or might be', 2022

'a landscape for remembering', 2021, 29 x 42cm

'a landscape for remembering', 2021, 29 x 42cm

'what we were or might be', 2022, 80 x 60cm

'what we were or might be', 2022, 80 x 60cm

'a landscape for remembering', 2021, 29 x 21cm

'a landscape for remembering', 2021, 29 x 21cm

'substitute mannequin', 2022, 60 x 170cm

'substitute mannequin', 2022, 60 x 170cm