Seeping, oozing, metastasizing, Isabelle Andriessen’s bodily sculptures sit in an affective space between categories. They demand to be read through a combination of materials that resists stasis, as troubled and sticky agents in their own right. Ongoing processes of calcification and condensation measure out timespans that exceed the human, spinning a narrative that will continue long after their time of exhibition. Approaching them in a gallery space provokes an uncanny sense of both the familiar and the simultaneously illegible; perhaps they are future archives for a culture that has toxified its earth and water; or are they beings parasitically feeding off the exhibition architecture? Andriessen’s research and practice builds speculative worlds in which she explores the agency of clusters of interlacing materials, parsing queer materialism and probing plastics, crystals, and coolant for latent dark intent.

Natasha Hoare: I’m interested in your approach to world-building through materials that aren’t often seen in combination.
Isabelle Andriessen: My work seeks to create (science) fictional windows into other or alternative realities. I aim to reveal the agency of materials and the passage of time. By animating inanimate materials I want to reveal the unreliable characteristics within materials that might otherwise seem dormant or passive. In order to uncover a darker agenda, I manipulate synthetic materials so that they creep and crawl, move and drip, leak and ooze, as if they obtain a metabolism that is infected. They are composite entities that you don’t expect to move; they’re static and were made to be resilient. I started working with electricity and chemistry as tools, to see how I can develop a range of materials that gradually change over time. Somehow these sculptures become performers that reveal something of themselves that wouldn’t be clear or visible in one visit, but only over multiple visits or multiple exhibitions. There is an inherent tension between these events or changes and the fact that they cannot be wholly witnessed; the viewer will always miss a large part of the transformation.
For a while now I have been researching the liminal space between performance and sculpture while questioning notions of conservation. What if sculptural changes over time are irreversible? How does this affect conservation and restoration? When my works are acquired, they come with a set of instructions, or activation manual, like a performance. Performance within the art institute primarily centers around the human body performing, but I’m interested in expanding that definition and creating a relationship in which my artworks somehow interact with the art institute.

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