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.
