Carlos/Ishikawa, London.

Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Clothing has always promised more than simple utility. What we wear can conceal and reveal, protect and expose; it can communicate who we are, or allow us to imagine who we might become. For Issy Wood, these contradictions have provided fertile territory. Jackets, coats and other garments recur throughout her paintings, typically isolated from the bodies they are designed to contain and cropped so closely that fabric, folds and fastenings become landscapes unto themselves. In Kinkstarter II, Wood transforms the familiar language of fashion into something stranger and more psychologically charged.

For Wood, clothing can function as both surrogate and shield. She has described jackets as “armor and a kind of defense — a shell or second skin, depending on what you want to protect yourself from.” Emptied of their wearers, her garments nevertheless retain a powerful sense of bodily presence. Their folds imply volume; openings suggest what might lie beneath. Yet the person remains tantalizingly out of reach. In this sense, Kinkstarter II approaches portraiture without depicting a face—or indeed a figure at all. Identity resides instead in its outermost layer, something that can be put on, removed or exchanged.

That possibility of exchange is particularly important to Wood, whose source material frequently comes from the seductive image-world of contemporary fashion. She has drawn from sites including SSENSE, Farfetch and Vogue Runway, where clothing is photographed, cropped and illuminated to transform it into an object of desire. “There’s a neediness to it,” Wood has said of such imagery. “They are trying to get you to own these items.” Browsing these images becomes a process of “shopping for different kinds of women that I could be.” The garment is never simply a garment. It carries the fantasy of transformation offered by consumer culture: acquire the object, and perhaps acquire something of the person it promises you might become.

Removed from their commercial settings and enlarged beyond ordinary proportions, Wood’s objects become simultaneously desirable and unsettling. That instability extends to the painting’s support. Wood frequently works on velvet, its soft, light-absorbing surface creating a material contradiction with the leather and synthetic fabrics she depicts. She has described her jacket paintings as “sort of a joke with myself about painting,” explaining the appeal of “painting a fabric on a different fabric; what it’s like to render leather on velvet, or a technical fabric on velvet, or even painting a velvet jacket on velvet—it has an uncanniness to it.” A material associated with touch is thus used to conjure another that we can see but never feel.

That “uncanniness” sits at the heart of Wood’s work. She makes the recognizable difficult to pin down, transforming ordinary objects into something both intimate and alien. As Margaret Kross has observed, “Issy Wood’s universe of images suggests a stream of consciousness hiding something foreboding, a medieval current creeping into the millennial.” In Kinkstarter II, that undercurrent emerges from an otherwise distinctly contemporary object. The garment seduces through its surface while remaining conspicuously empty; it evokes the body while withholding it, leaving something strangely unknowable in its place.