Two Years | One Building, A Studio Show: Isabella Loudon

Two Years | One Building, a Studio Show: Isabella Loudon

What if an artist was given free rein to infiltrate a building, extending beyond their studio space to fill it with their own sculptural work? From 8-10 December sculptor Isabella Loudon opened up the building she has been working in for the last two years, and has now taken over. This was a rare chance to see a site-specific multi-roomed installation before the building is demolished in 2024.

Isabella Loudon is a 2016 Fine Arts graduate of Massey University, Wellington and since that time she has been making a name for herself as one of Aotearoa’s most interesting sculptors. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions, including ‘Labyrinth’ at the Dowse Art Museum in 2018, a sculptural drawing made from concrete-covered twine; the group exhibition – ‘The Tomorrow People’ in 2017 at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi and a large installation Platforms in the group exhibition ‘Unravelled’ in 2019 at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. Her primary medium at that time was concrete but over the last two years she has branched out into plaster, copper and discarded rubber inner tubes from cars, trucks, tractors and bikes. For Loudon, the space a work occupies is often integral to how it is read, she makes the comparison to how her drawings occupy the space of a page – ‘chaotic with one thing talking to another’. She likes to keep things tidy and organised in the studio but the instinctive way she works leads to a certain kind of chaos.