Isabel - Late blooming & the joy in loudness

MAYA If you could maybe give me a quick breakdown of your project, that would be so wonderful.

 Photos by J-Han.

ISABEL: I ended up making a trio of self-portrait-like paintings–in oil and digitally–exploring some of my feelings about being (more) openly queer after a lifetime of not letting that aspect of my identity take center stage.

MAYA: What is identity and how would you define it? Has it changed over the years for you? Has it been pretty consistent?

ISABEL: For me, identity is what I create, the unique way I think, how I travel through the world, and how I express myself. The first time I realized, “I don’t feel particularly connected to the concept of womanhood–I want foremost to be seen through my art and ideas.” Centering my artistry, and strongly desiring to decenter gender, was key to my non-binary identity.

When I was a teenager, being online was important and freeing for me because you don't have to be fully transparent online. You don't have to wear your own face. You don't have to use your full legal name. That was a core moment for me when I realized identity is what I choose and not what I'm born with. 

MAYA: As you were talking, sorry, this is really terrible to say. But I was like, oh my god, Tumblr.

ISABEL: Yeah, yeah, Tumblr was really important to me! The 2010s art community online was important to me and I think it's changed a lot. It's not really like that online now and I feel sad about that, but I'm sure that younger kids have their own good things that they're making in online spaces through.

MAYA: I hope they can carry on the legacy.  Anyway, Issue 3 is centered on the theme of identity. What aspects of your own identity and your definition of identity are you looking to tie into this piece? 

ISABEL: I'm focusing on my nostalgia for the freedom I described when I was a teenager and when I am online. I grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, and then I moved to America for college. In my senior year, I was done with all my technical degree requirements, so suddenly I had the free time to pick the classes that I wanted. I returned to creative writing, found more artistic and queer friends, and I finally felt like I had time to create. 

I was returning to a version of myself that I originally liked better, that had been stuffed in the closet for me to achieve my girlboss career goal dreams. 

As a teenager, I always knew I was queer, but I was from New Zealand, a country of 5 million people, basically a small US state. I'm a cultural late bloomer, in the sense that I was only really around vibrant queer communities after I moved to the US. My art is about that process of late blooming, through my more recent experiences about growing into my identity again.

MAYA: Would you say you're coming full circle or you're blooming? From the digital age of the 2010s online, where you were anonymous, coming full circle to now…do you think that person you were online in the 2010s is now the person you are now in reality?

ISABEL: I'm more of that person again, but now in a real space. Back then, I didn't have that; I had a couple queer friends in high school. At that point, the term GSA (Gay Straight Alliance) hadn't even arrived in New Zealand. We didn't know what a GSA was because we lived in a country with a small, limited, queer history. Now, I have all those feelings and intentions again, but I'm lucky that I'm in the Bay Area in California, where there's a really rich history that I can learn from and bring into who I was before.

MAYA: I saw that you said your identity is defined by “falling into in-between spaces”. How did this play a role in your project? 

ISABEL: Starting out, I made different drafts and compositions that are about facets of my personality or identity. For each person, there is so much across a cultural identity, where you personally grew up versus your heritage and your ancestry, gender, and even age and experiences, etc. So far, there's a gap between these pieces that I've made because I haven't been able to reconcile those things. The “in-betweenness” of it is that it's hard to neatly put them all together because they feel really disparate; 

It's hard to say that I have a defined persona or path that's been trodden before. I'm trying to piece together these parts of me in languages or vocabularies that haven't existed yet. 

MAYA: When I was looking through your portfolio, I noticed you use a lot of bright, eye-catching colors, even when the subject is not as positive. Traditionally, as a non-artist, I see bright colors as a sign of something positive. Do you think this is going to affect how people are going to view your work? 

ISABEL: I love using bright colors and doing a lot of high contrast in my work. Sometimes, when I'm trying to do a more subdued piece or a palette-limited piece, I look at it, and I'm like, no, I'm gonna add all the colors back in. Some of this is my personal style. Recently my old roommate moved out and took all the furniture with her, so I ordered new furniture. When people stop by, they're like, this looks like a children's museum. I'm really excited by a work that evokes love and joy. If it's not necessarily a positive emotion that the piece is expressing, the vibrancy has a lot of intensity and impact, and that's what I'm drawn to. A long time ago, I did a series of works that was focusing on youth expression, and I was using really intense and bright colors to imply this need to be loud and audacious in that space to be heard. I can use vibrancy in a way that isn't necessarily positive. Overall, it's just for me, it makes me feel really intensely about the work, and I hope the viewer does too.

M: When you say you're working in computer science, do you do UI/UX, or computer science? 

ISABEL:  I'm a software engineer, but I've been continuing my research from college because I want to go back and do a PhD in the next two years. I grew up on the internet and the internet then is such a fascinating medium for me, for communities, for building a way for artists to connect with each other. I do research on how artists interact with the internet, how digital artists use software, etc. I'm also interested in youth on the internet, like digital safety for young people. The software engineering job is what I'm doing on the side to save up for when I make no money during a PhD. 

MAYA: Do you apply any of this digital experience to your artwork? Does this affect you in any way or do you keep work and art separate? 

ISABEL: Before I studied computer science at all, I was already interested in the internet. In some of my older works you can see these digital motifs, before I even knew anything about how to build software. I'm working on trying to use these skills to incorporate them into my art. Recently, a friend and I made a web story, a lot of text with some illustrations, and we hosted it on an interactive website because I know how to code now. I'm also interested in things like computational poetry, which people like because it's so interactive and  you can click buttons and generate new words programmatically. That's the thing that I've been trying to learn more about. So in some ways, it's coming together.

MAYA: You talk about continuously experiencing growth and change throughout your life, right? So has there ever been a time where you were stagnant, where there was no change? And if so, what did you take away from it and how has it affected your perspective?

ISABEL: It's hard to pinpoint a time that I felt stagnant because, inversely, I was changing a lot and I couldn't tell what exactly was causing it or what was the root cause. When I entered college, that's a point where people say, oh, you change a lot when you enter university. At the same time, I was moving to a country I'd never been to before where I didn't have any family and I didn't know anyone. All my New Zealand friends asked, do you feel America made you different? I didn’t know if it was America, or computer science, starting university, but everything was changing. I couldn't tell if it was good or inevitable. Now that I've graduated, it’s in my own hands to build my own schedule. You take a little more initiative to look for the communities that you want to be a part of and contribute to. This is the place where I could see myself, you know, taking a breather or having almost the opportunity to stagnate if I wanted to.

MAYA: So do you want the chance to stagnate? That has a very negative meaning though [laughs]. Do you think routine is now more important than change, even though maybe the change wasn't necessarily a choice?

ISABEL: Recently, I've been feeling a lot of pressure from myself to continue doing the things I was doing before in college at the same rate, while also working a 9 to 5.I want to be putting out a lot of artwork or making a lot of artwork. I want to be writing more. I want to be publishing things. I want to be doing my research. But there isn't the rigidity of, oh, this is class time, this is college club time or whatever. I have my 9 to 5, and I'm trying to cram as many things in after work as possible. What I probably need is some kind of reset to look at what I'm doing and say, is this what I have time for? Is this healthy for me? That’s the benefit of taking a moment to sit and breathe.

MAYA: For sure. I feel it's a pretty common experience after college to feel lost once you no longer have that community. I have one more question for you and it is a little bit of a broad one, so feel free to answer however you like. What drives and motivates you? What do you live for?

ISABEL: I'm just really excited about the world. There are so many fun and beautiful things to look forward to in any aspect of life, so that's something that motivates me, one, to just get up every day, but also in my art. I'm very excited by other people's work. Not necessarily art made by other artists, but the art of someone leaving a note in a public space, or drawing a dog in the corner in wet concrete. What the world looks like, what it has to offer, and what people have to offer to each other I find really endearing. I spend a lot of time taking joy in as I move through the world. 

You can see Isabel’s full final project by purchasing 03: The Identity Issue.