Embracing Contradiction

Studio visit with Isabel English

by Julie Morrissy

In her sculptural practice, Isabel English uses domestic materials to explore tensions between girlhood and womanhood. She sources accessible and everyday textiles that have already had use or wear, including bed linen, from home supply stores and charity shops. In their lifespan as reused objects, these materials gesture to ideas of transfer and inheritance that align with transitional stages of life.      

These ways of working come to bear across English’s practice but particularly, in her work A Separate Self, first exhibited in Fly Floor, a group exhibition curated by Mark O’Gorman and Niamh O’Malley which I saw at The Complex Gallery, Dublin in 2023. The artwork, a textile-sculpture made from pleated yellowed cotton bedsheets, was fixed to the wall with steel curtain wire, dressmakers’ pins and metal curtain hooks. This list of materials recalls domestic work, housekeeping, and forms of labour and craft traditionally gendered female. The pleated material, spanning half the length of the gallery wall, is reminiscent of school uniforms and tennis dresses. It is evocative of a particular type of curtain, common in Parisian restaurants, that splits the window and obscures the view. On my studio visit with English we spend considerable time discussing her pleated forms, during which she explains that the competing concerns of decoration and concealment underlie her practice. The reference to knee-length skirts in the sculpture brings a playfulness to the work, linking to girlhood and carefree childhood days. However, it also suggests covering up, which is reinforced by the joint reference to restaurant curtains, designed to keep the customers hidden from the eyeline of passersby.

English’s decision to hang the material at her waist-height alludes to the embodied quality of the work. The waist-height represents a half-way point in the body, gesturing again to the transitionary period between girlhood and adulthood during which modesty is emphasised and sexuality emerges. The artwork foregrounds ideas of both protection and self-expression, bringing to mind rules about uniforms, common in school and sport, the stringency of which is often gendered. The polyester interfacing in the artwork mirrors a technique used by dressmakers to stiffen fabric and hold pleats in place. The repetition of English’s pleats alludes to patterns of behaviour, while the tightly controlled technique of the interfacing evokes societal constraints on young women and girls. The pleated skirt however, so often associated with a coquette aesthetic, can also represent an expression of sexuality and, as such, a way of asserting control over one’s body. Thus, the artwork intricately weaves together complex notions of femininity, womanhood, and agency. The distressed state of the materials further reinforces the embodied element of English’s intervention, foregrounding a worn-out or lived-in quality, which again links to domestic labour, and even exhaustion. The Irish context, with its deeply embedded gender inequality, provides another layer to the work, inviting scrutiny of these found materials literally bearing the sweat and tears of those who made, washed, mended, slept in, and wore the garments before. Their everyday and tactile nature elicit a desire to reach out and feel the fabric but, of course, the gallery context means that we cannot.    

The artwork’s title A Separate Self too, outlines these opposing states of constraint and empowerment. English explains that it refers to psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler’s theory of “separation-individuation”, the gradual process by which an individual understands they are separate from their primary caregiver. The title deftly links to childhood, adolescence, and the fraught process of taking one’s place in the world, specifically as a woman. The mix of sexuality, labour, and play in the artwork accentuates the complexity of those transitions, as a woman grapples with all the ways in which her body and her actions are policed, while also being sexualised under the pressure of the male gaze. In fact, the word “anxiety” arises several times during my conversation with English at her studio, in which she shows me several artworks-in-progress that feature a pleated or corrugated pattern on paper or cardboard. This duality of patterns, as both a form of comfort or security and a form of negative repetition is at the core of English’s work: she both relies on the pattern and questions it. In this way, her concentration on structure and patterns simultaneously acknowledges and challenges expectations around girlhood and womanhood. English’s work dwells in such contradictions in her thoughtful exploration of the knotty web of protection, inheritance, and care.

Julie Morrissy is the MLP x The Complex writer in residence from October 2024 – February 2025.
Isabel English is a studio artist at The Complex.