Catalogue Notes
A cropped leather jacket floats against a velvet ground—no body inside, just suggestion and sheen. This kind of charged ambiguity has become Issy Wood’s signature. The London-based artist is known for her monumentally scaled oil paintings of everyday objects that hum with psychological resonance, from car interiors and tea sets to dental fillings, and women’s outerwear.
In Armour 4/I have an addiction, sir! (2019), painted on black velvet, a simple hunter-green garment becomes a site of contradiction: protective yet exposing, ordinary yet uncanny. The lush, tactile surface pulls the viewer in, but what we see is only part of the picture. The jacket becomes a portrait of identity, a stand-in for the body it conceals and reveals. As with much of Wood’s work, it speaks to themes of materiality, gender, privacy, and the fragile rituals of self-presentation.
These garments, almost always cropped, faceless, or disembodied, act as surrogates for a missing figure. The body is never shown, but its absence is palpable. A coat without a wearer becomes an emblem of protection, performance, or personal concealment. As Wood has noted, and as the title of this painting suggests, these jackets are “armor and a kind of defense — a shell or second skin, depending on what you want to protect yourself from.” Suspended in a neutral void, they carry the psychological weight of a portrait without features. Identity here becomes something you can zip into or shrug off: intimate, provisional, and vulnerable to misreading.
Wood mines her source material from the digital image-worlds of fashion photography—particularly from e-commerce platforms like SSENSE, Farfetch, and Vogue Runway. These websites present garments as objects of desire, lit and posed for maximum seduction. “There’s a neediness to it,” she has said. “They are trying to get you to own these items.” She mines these glossy images, scavenging not just for clothes but for potential selves. “Shopping for different kinds of women that I could be,” as she once put it. In her paintings, she sometimes enhances their visual polish, other times undercuts it: “Either mak[ing] it uglier than it appears on the website or just lean[ing] into how distressingly seductive it is.” That tension—between allure and discomfort, fantasy and disillusion—ripples through her work. The coats are beautiful, yes, but they’re also spectral: emptied of bodies yet full of implication.
Velvet, in Wood’s hands, isn’t merely a surface — it’s part of the conceptual trick. A glossy synthetic jacket rendered in oil on matte black velvet becomes a layered illusion: one texture impersonating another. Velvet’s softness and light absorption make it an ideal foil for depicting synthetic sheens, producing a visual double-take. The result is both sumptuous and uncanny. Wood herself has called this effect “a sort of joke with myself about painting,” a self-aware gesture that plays with artifice, medium, and mimicry. Lustrous highlights shimmer against the velvet’s absorbent depths; shadows don’t just fall — they dissolve. The medium doesn’t just carry the image; it alters its emotional and visual weight.
Across Wood’s paintings of jackets and coats, ideas of protection, performance, and projection are encrypted into every fold and seam. These are not still lifes in the traditional sense. They are loaded, psychologically charged objects. Murky greens, bruised purples, and dark reds dominate her palette, and tight crops create a sense of confinement. A sleeve, a lapel, a button: each detail becomes a clue. A jacket shields, but it also signals. In Wood’s hands, it lingers like a second skin—molding to the absent figure and bearing traces of everything she once carried.
