BIO

Isabelle is a French artist based in London. She studied printed textiles and Fine arts in Paris. She worked in textiles, in France, UK and Indonesia as well as fair trade in Bangladesh.

Her work is rooted into an extensive drawing practice across different mediums. She explores different streams, one is rooted in history, nourishes by a curiosity for decorative arts, along an intuitive process translated in fluid drawings.

While visiting the Rijsk Museum she became fascinated by ceramics as a medium bearing and entwining multitude of cultural testimonials and imagery. In the series of botanical drawings each element of the compositions carefully chosen through her researches. Isabelle playfully associates objects from different eras and styles. Vases and ceramics are surrounded by a luxurious riot of motifs and surrealists elements such as eyes, hands, glassed creating a maximalist collector’s utopia.

The ink portraits are based on a regular practice of drawing on khadi paper, enjoying the unpredictability os each sheet of paper, unique in grain, absorbency level. Having worked with they medium for many years she works in a fluid and intuitive manner. Balancing shapes and colours, undefined shapes with sharp details. Aiming to evoke a portrait with an economy of elements relying on the the graphic quality of a single stroke and drop of colour.

Her curiosity for the decorative arts, has led her to collect vintage fabrics, art books and lately transfer plates. French transfer plates, assiettes parlantes as well as British antique transfer ware. Through the use of stencil, female silhouettes or portraits, eyes, hands are layered onto the patterned plates and dishes. The stencil technique, a way to explore another drawing technique, drawing with a cutter, the line is sharp, unforgiving. The female layered on antique transfer plates are fierce and poetic. Rewriting a new life for elements of past domesticity.