Our winter artist-in-residence is Isabelle Carr.

Isabelle grew up in Dorset, and has since been living and working in London and, more recently, in Chengdu, China. While at the cottage, she hopes to develop a series of paintings which draw on the visual language of her photographic work made in Chengdu. Observing spatial relationships within the cultural landscape, she records material accumulations and informal structures that exist between states of utility and reuse.

Drawn to encounters where the weight, scale and arrangement of entities playfully hinge on prepositions, she documents compositions that focus on the spaces above, below, around and amidst. Isabelle reinterprets the liminal states of these materials, and their sculptural logics, through painterly markmaking and recurring dualities—lightness and heaviness, balance and imbalance, isolation and connection— to examine whether deeper meaning lies in presence or absence.

This inquiry is echoed by contrasting the solid stillness of paint with areas of transparency, exaggerating a deliberate hiddenness and revealing the internal mechanics of the work’s construction. Her work reflects on impermanence, material memory, and the layered negotiations between people and place.