Degree: MFA
University: Glasgow School of Art
Graduation Year: 2025
Isaac Willis treats painting as a receptive surface where images from the past are reframed and re-formed. Figures and fragments surface with an uncanny familiarity: we recognise them, though can't always place them. Cropped from the vast archive of art history and juxtaposed with other motifs, they become estranged from their original contexts. His muted palette lends these apparitions a dreamlike register, as though history itself were returning through faded recollection. In works such as Domain, where raven-beak supports appear to prop up a pictorial threshold, Willis makes painting into a site of temporal slippage - a portal where history is less a singular path than a mutable constellation, contingent on how we look and remember.
I think of paintings as receptive surfaces for ideas, explored through images and physical material. This receptivity allows for a great sense of freedom and experimentation within the painting practice. The practice engages with the concept of history and mutability through painted crops of historical paintings and their juxtaposition on the surface of the painting with objects and other painted images. Ultimately questioning the power of history and the reading of history as a singular path.