Isabella Covert (b. 2001 Milwaukee, WI) is a painter and sculptor. She received a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2023 and is currently a MFA Candidate and Graduate Fellowship recipient at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Referencing body horror and the boundary-less nature of the body, her work examines the relationship of reproducing bodies within current biopolitical frameworks. Prodding at expanding posthuman potentialities of the body, she investigates liberation and contradiction within synthetic biology. Covert currently lives and works in Savannah, GA.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Communicating the interplay of excess political control and gendered dynamics, the entangled forms in my work abstract the body and its capabilities. Permeating a paradoxical allure with materials like latex and hair, my work serves as a surrogate for the body and the afflictions of bodily containment. I wrestle in the goo of abjection, subverting the marginalizing nature of disgust, and emphasizing the allure and humor. Bodies here are unstable and boundary-less. They violate standard rules imposed upon materials - tampering with tactile relationships that promote rapid aging, cracking, discoloration, and festering. I work in a space of untangling entrails, of discovering and autopsying contradictions. Shedding my skin, repairing wounds, peeling blisters, reducing swelling, picking scabs, and excreting the self, I scratch at the relationship of the body and the structural tendencies they exist in.
These forms challenge the biopolitics of bodies as subordinated vessels for collective future, suggesting an alternative posthuman relationship between power and reproduction. Drawing from feminist reconfigurations of the body as unregulated potentialities beyond constructed margins, these fabricated anatomies are birthed from the gut and play in the viscera.