Broadworks presents a solo exhibition by artist Isabella Morales Salis

Late Opening: 7th August 5-8pm (RSVP below)

Isabella is a Latin American artist from Brazil whose practice emerges from the understanding that personal anxieties reflect a broader communal unease about climate collapse and global uncertainty. Coming from the Global South, a place shaped by histories of displacement and colonization, they witnessed firsthand how traditional ways of being often prove insufficient for processing the overwhelming complexities of environmental grief. This experience, combined with a personal exploration of gender identity, evolved into their signature approach: narrative paintings that require time to unlock their meanings—time which for the artist is as much a ritual as the act of creation itself.

Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity—the right to remain undefined—their work is a refusal to conform to dominant systems of meaning. They embrace ambiguity and fragmentation as tools of resistance, creating queer ecosystems where life and its inevitable decay are not opposing forces, but intimate partners.

Using a palette of unreal, emotive color, they construct these worlds—realms that are vibrant and teeming with life, yet perpetually haunted by a quiet, persistent sadness. This duality is central to their practice. They populate these landscapes with hybrid beings and spectral animals, figures caught within fragmented, dream-like narratives. These figures are fluid and unfixed, their bodies often dissolving into their environment, challenging stable notions of identity, gender, and the boundary between human and nature.

Their process of layering and excavation mirrors the way memory and trauma are buried and unearthed. Each painting is a psychological landscape where personal grief can touch upon collective anxieties about our ecological future. Ultimately, they aim to create spaces where complexity is protected, where bodies, like ecosystems, are understood as deeply emotional and mutable homes. The work invites viewers to pause in this in-between, to imagine being alive as a shared, transformative process