Carlos/Ishikawa, London. 

Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Beijing, X Museum, Issy Wood: Good Clean Fun, December 2020 – February 2021.

Paris, Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Issy Wood Study For No, October 2023 – January 2024. 

Few artists have captured the emotional texture of today's image culture quite like Issy Wood. Painter, musician, and writer, Wood draws her artistic inspiration from the images and objects that circulate through contemporary life: social media feeds, luxury advertisements, and even auction catalogues. Her paintings are rarely about their subjects alone. Instead, they probe the desires, memories, and anxieties that cling to them, transforming familiar objects into something stranger, more intimate, and faintly unsettling.

Wood transforms a porcelain service sourced from a vintage auction catalogue into a theatre of desire in Help Yourself (Large). Plates, cups, tureens, and pitchers stack across the canvas with the strange authority of an altarpiece, their floral decoration and gilded edges evoking the rituals of collection, display, and taste. At first glance, the image appears almost aggressively genteel. Yet Wood unsettles that refinement at every turn. Cropped tightly and rendered with a blurred, dreamlike softness, the porcelain hovers between heirloom and commodity, treasured object and digital afterimage. What begins as a still life slowly becomes something stranger: an arrangement suspended between elegance and unease, presence and dissolution.

The source material—found among auction catalogues at her grandmother's house—is central to the work's emotional charge. “I can't really say what it is I bring during the painting,” Wood reflected in a 2022 interview, “but I guess it starts from the source images—especially the ones from auctions, which are often the result of events like divorce and death. Those start with a sadness built-in for me.” While auction photography is generally designed to maximize an object’s desirability, Wood is drawn to the quieter histories that linger beneath the glossy surface. “There's something quite sad about any sales image,” she continued. “There's a neediness to it that I'm thrilled to meet halfway.”

People are conspicuously absent from Wood's paintings. Instead, she gravitates toward the objects they accumulate, inherit, covet, and eventually leave behind. Porcelain services, luxury accessories, car interiors, and other possessions become stand-ins for human presence, carrying with them the emotional residue of ownership.

At the same time, Wood approaches her subjects with a characteristic ambivalence. "There are objects I'd like to both paint and own," she has said, "but most of what I paint I have to find hideous in at least one way." Embedded within the joke is a larger truth about her practice. Painting becomes a way of possessing something while also keeping it at arm's length. Seduction and rejection operate in equal measure.

Like Wood's music, which often pairs sharp observation with emotional vulnerability, Help Yourself disguises its depth beneath an apparently cool surface. Neither nostalgic nor ironic, the painting lingers in the space between attraction and distance, possession and release. In Wood's hands, even the most ordinary objects become repositories of feeling, charged with the desires that brought them into view—and eventually sent them back into circulation.

What I learned from all the self-help books I picked up at airports is that our ego -our sense of self- is, in fact, an assemblage of mental convictions, inherited dogmas, and preconceived ideals, carefully arranged into a coherent structure. These mental constructs, acquired or inoculated since birth, become the governing matrix through which we make sense of the ultimate chaos of both the universe and our inner world.

We revere and cling to these ideas as though they were idols. This attachment serves us insofar as it provides stability, but it also traps us in an endless loop of existential procrastination. Deep down, we know that these mental idols are made of porcelain. We instinctively keep them out of reach of anything that might shatter them, because with their destruction comes the collapse of our carefully constructed worldview.

As long as these beliefs continue to serve us, they are useful. More often than not, however, this tableware of consciousness consists of little more than fragile, overbearing relics that keep us stuck. To contemplate smashing them on the floor-and embracing all the unpredictable consequences that would follow-is, in my opinion, what is at play in this remarkable Issy Wood painting.

As the saying goes, you can’t make an omelette without cracking eggs. Perhaps you can’t make truly great art without smashing a little porcelain.

B. Schwabsky, K. Phillips, R. Lamarche-Vadel and I. Wood, Issy Wood Study For No, Paris: Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation Galeries Lafayette, 2023, p. 47 (illustrated in color).