Isabella Loudon

Isabella Loudon

No Tomorrow, 2024, scaffolding, steel, mud, cheesecloth, and rope.

Going for a walk on Auckland’s West Coast in the wake of last year’s floods was to encounter a landscape calm and familiar, yet with periodic reminders of recent disaster. A river may have returned to its usual flow and path, but debris hanging from bowed fence posts recalled how high it had risen and how violently it had raged. Isabella Loudon’s sculpture No Tomorrow—made of derelict scaffolding draped in mud-caked cloth, stiffened into shape—is a meditation on the inevitability of such change and our vulnerability to forces beyond our control. In its slumped and sunken forms, she hopes we see the fatigue and grief we experience when confronted with disaster.

Isabella Loudon (b.1994) graduated from Massey University, Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington, in 2016. She is known for making works from twine and fabric dipped in concrete, plaster, metal, and old rubber inner tubes. Her work looks back to anti-form sculptors like Robert Morris and Eva Hesse. Her group shows include Unravelled at City Gallery Wellington in 2019. She has also had several solo shows with Robert Heald, in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington, and one with Trish Clark, in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. In 2023, she won the Olivia Spencer Bower Award. She is currently based in Marton near Whanganui, where, in 2023, she presented Two Years | One Building, an exhibition in that filled her entire studio building.