Isabelle Hayman
Isabelle Hayman is a French artist based in London.
She trained as a textile designer in Paris, and completed a Master of Fine Arts from Paris I. She has extensive experience in textiles and spent time living in Java. Childhood connections to Africa and a love of travel deeply inform her work as well as her background in textiles and an avid curiosity for the decorative arts.
Her practice spans from a series of detailed ink drawings still life to a more rhythmic, fluid expression focusing on female portraits. The series of large detailed ink drawings was inspired by a visit to the Rijsk Museum’s porcelain department. Isabelle imagines scenes created by an eccentric collector, mixing emblematic pieces of ceramic or porcelain combined with a complex grid of patterns filling the foliage and the flowers on a background inspired by textiles pieces. Each piece of the drawing is like a puzzle, the foliage and flowers are small microcosms inhabited with geometric patterns and surrealist references showing hands, eyes, faces.
Different eras and textures are liberally juxtaposed in a maximalist aesthetic.