Text Works
Isabella has been making works which centre on the expanded text since 2000. These include audio works, prints, wall drawings, embossed cards, code, essays, video-works and other textual games and pleasures, What text means to artists, the relationship between text and image, and what reading does are key concerns in her work. Some examples are below, but there are more.
The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin, 2017
Turn Right At The Statue of Love
For The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin, contributors responded to the invitation to accompany Benjamin in reproducing the web of connections of his diagram (the labyrinth of his autobiography), which, once lost (he was inconsolable), was never fully redrawn. Isabella produced her print Turn Right At The Statue of Love, combining routes round a garden and snatched overhearings into a map…
COBRA RES 1.9 Flash Fiction, 2015
Veritas Temporis Filia
On the 25th June 2015 the COBRA Committee held its first meeting in response to refugees and migrants attempting to enter Britain via Calais. This latest response by COBRA RES binds together previously unpublished flash fiction short stories and texts made in direct response to the ‘Calais Crisis’ COBRA Committee meetings, and the overall crisis faced by hundreds and thousands of refugees moving towards and across Europe.
As a counter-narrative to the COBRA Committee, the stories and experimental texts assembled do not offer sound bites or sermons. Instead, they present momentary tales amid the confusion and chaos that infest emergency events, writing out lost stories and loose notes on the border between fact and fiction.
Isabella contributed five microfictions.
Maison Perry exhibition, Giverny, 2011
Saying What I Mean For Once
One of four works Isabella showed for An Exquisite Golden Instrument, her end-of-residency show at Maison Perry in 2011, Saying What I Mean For Once (Love Me Or Die), was a 5m x 5m graphite and gold wall-drawing using text from the Lunar Surface Journal to explore ideas of viewing and interpretation.