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Effective January 1: Masks are Optional in VisArts’ Classrooms and Studios
In her latest body of work, Isabella Whitfield repurposes recycled paper pulp from her 2024 solo show, Best regards, transforming past questions of utility and purpose into new reflections on object sentimentality. Whitfield explores how color, scale, and texture shape our emotional attachments to objects and how they, in turn, become warped mirrors of our internal selves.
Through casting and papermaking techniques, Whitfield embraces a process that values endurance above all else. The repetition of creating hundreds of tiny sculptures becomes both mentally and physically monotonous. By confronting the challenges of large-scale production, Whitfield examines the fluid boundaries between craft, fabrication, and what it means to be original.Â
All My Children Are Good People reflects on the tendency to create physical environments that reinforce internal self-conceptions, investigating the dissonance between reality and the narratives we choose to tell. Through repetition and the reprocessing of materials, Whitfield considers how these narratives evolve, carrying multiple, often contradictory stories—each equally fictitious and truthful.Â
Isabella Whitfield is a multidisciplinary artist based in Virginia, working primarily in papermaking, sculpture, and site-responsive installation. After receiving BAs in sculpture and politics from the University of Virginia, she completed a postgraduate year as an Aunspaugh Art Fellow.
Whitfield exhibits primarily in the DMV and has been a resident artist with Penland, Anderson Ranch, Ox-Bow, Pyramid Atlantic, and VisArts Richmond. She was a 2022-2024 Hamiltonian Fellow and is currently a Papermaking Associate at Pyramid Atlantic.
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