Ishbel Angus is an artist currently based in London doing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, supported by The President and Vice-Chancellor’s UK Cost of Living Scholarship. Ishbel recently graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a degree in Painting and Printmaking.
This series of work titled Uhtceare acts as both a euphemism and a confrontation of gender-based violence and misogyny and its lingering dissociative effects on one’s perception of reality. Ishbel paints the liminal space between 'healing' and 're-living' through the lens of object-oriented ontology, a philosophy that counters anthropocentrism and views objects with their own sense of independent reality separate from humans. Within these works, these inflatable lilos become a site of catharsis, abstraction and transference of body and self. There’s an attempt at reflecting the complex emotional and physical processes of navigating trauma while maintaining an ambiguity and distance to their conception.
Ishbel’s current work explores queerness and gender through an autobiographical feminist lens, using painting as a means to define the undefined. Engaging with themes of mysticism, sci-fi and queer theory, she investigates the tension between the known and unknown, subverting traditions to explore liberation, performativity, identity, and transformation. Playfulness is central to Ishbel’s process, especially in material exploration, where they balance darker themes with lightness and reclamation. Through manipulation of different visual languages, Ishbel aims to create illusions and hyperrealities that challenge boundaries of surfaces and identities, ultimately reflecting the complexities of queerness, trauma, and the act of self-definition.
