2022 Grad Show

Isabel Vermeulen

Sculpture

isabelvermeulenca.wixsite.com/artistresearch/home

My practice explores fears, anxieties, and traumas concerning physical, emotional, and sexual abuse resulting in trauma. To express these physical and mental afflictions, I utilize ink drawings, mixed media sculpture, and photographs as methods to portray my own emotional turmoil with domestic and sexual assault. Through these various mediums, I negotiate these subjects from a personal context as a method of understanding my own and other people’s experiences with traumatic experiences. Drawing, in its direct and immediate quality, is used as a medium to translate the visceral nature of thoughts due to trauma. Sculpture, inversely, acts as a theatrical medium in which scenes and bodies are given embodied form to materialize both fictional and non-fictional characters. And photography, as a medium, is able to document the theatricality of sculpture and the body within the space.
I utilize the erotic and grotesque to express loss of innocence experienced by young survivors of violence, as I am grieving my own loss of self. By focusing on trauma, I hope to aid others negotiate their own emotional wounds.