Isabella Vesely

Artist biography

I am an art and classical archaeology student from Waterloo who does comedy in her spare time and travels to Greece as an archaeological illustrator in the summer. I consider myself to be primarily a sculpture artist and have recently taken to working in stained glass and natural materials.

Our physical world is constantly eroding and decaying and transforming. It happens beyond our sight. Microscopic processes generate macroscopic results. The leaves change colour, fall, dry out, disappear. Repeat. It happens underground too; compacting, conceding, eroding, collecting, lithifying, fertilizing, springing forth anew. Each day a new bud, each season a new colour, and the millennia turn. I dig up the delicate stones of peoples past to see how time erodes their faces and hollows their bones. I found pristine 4000-year-old pottery under a bush. I see green grass when the snow melts. Yet dry yellow roses sit on my kitchen table shedding their petals at any vibration.

They say time changes everything. I am not in a position to argue. I am trying to answer my own questions. What changes and how? What remains?

Something is always lost. Something is always different. As the seasons change, I try to move on. I collect mementos. In order to hold onto something a little longer I must preserve it, if not in being than in essential qualities. I work with natural materials to reanimate the living things that have become merely ideas of themselves. All my organics are collected from the ground. It feels wrong to steal what is still living. Instead I create analogies for living beauties; re-creation is preservation.

Follow Isabella on Instagram