CORNER STORE COLUMN
Color, Whimsy, Weight
An Interview with Isabel Brown
by Sara Mae Henke
Isabel is a self-taught multimedia maker. Some of their favorite mediums to work with are painting, drawing, collage, textiles, and recycled and reclaimed materials. Focusing on expressions of queer identity and kinship structures, they use traditional techniques and experimentation with reclaimed materials to combine art and craft.
“These characters come from different worlds but they’ve been mushed together.”
“The style comes from the medium itself,” Isabel says, holding up a small purple-pink face to the camera. There is a vivid, twinkly quality to Isabel’s pieces. Their work stood out to me for the graphic style and character development — one collage depicts a close friend, Molly, tipping back a bowl of ramen to drink, one spring green scene paints larpers pirouetting around each other, the land itself topsy-turvy beneath their feet. Isabel’s artistic practice is full of those vistas into or small moments of world-building. We talked over Zoom and our conversation was bookended by a tour of their room: a string of stars on the wall, fairy wings, a dog toy shaped like a worm, a papier-mâché house.
Molly with Ramen
by Isabel Brown
Mixed media collage
2022
8 x 8 in.
We discussed how whimsy is inextricable from the liberatory work of world-building
Family Meeting by Isabel Brown
Acrylic on canvas
Isabel is less interested in individual characters, and more in collectivity, the alchemy that comes in relationships between people. “I’ll have these free standing creatures, I’ll accumulate them and put them into a world… These characters come from different worlds but they’ve been mushed together.” I think of the characters trading big expressions in Family meeting; a green mouth in an expression of emphatic conversation, a stern, wrinkled forehead painted in pale yellow acrylic. I found out an artist whose work reminded me of Isabel’s, Emily Harter, went to school with Isabel, and that small world moment felt indicative of Isabel’s work too: expansive, connective. I was also reminded of Evita Flores and Remedios Varo in the way Isabel approaches rendering groups of people. These relationships between real and imaged figures create the stakes in Isabel’s work. “There is so much uncertainty in our future and the weight of worldbuilding, the destruction of the world as we know it. And what’s going to come next?”
“My goal for 2024 is to make more bad art, or more fun, experimental kind of art.”
We discussed how whimsy is inextricable from the liberatory work of world-building– in referencing their favorite artists, Nicole Eisenmann, then Dana Schultz, Isabel said, “There’s color and whimsy, but still a weight to it.” They said sometimes they don’t totally see the importance of their own work, but then they keep coming back to the people that inspire them.
Isabel Brown’s work is available to purchase through our Flat File. Take a look!
If you have questions about dvaa’s SHOP, please direct them to our ProGRAMMING COORDINATOR at saramae@davinciartalliance.org
Sara Mae Henke (They/Them) is a genderqueer writer raised on the Chesapeake Bay. Their creative writing and research orbits around horror and the surreal as it contextualizes gender. They are a 2023 Big Ears Music Festival Scholar and 2022 Tinhouse Summer Writing Workshops alum. Recently, they were a finalist for the Loraine Williams Prize and have work forthcoming or published in Passages North, the Georgia Review, the Offing, and FENCE. They write music as The Noisy and received their MFA from UT Knoxville. They are currently an Adjunct English Professor at Drexel and an Executive Assistant at Da Vinci Art Alliance.