Artist and writer Isabel uses paint, fabric and collage to explore the subject of “home” in her first solo exhibition ‘Scraps, Patches and Rags” at the Weavers Factory in Manchester. Isabel explores a wide range of contemporary themes including loneliness, misogyny, racism and abandonment. Her paintings have a unique quality and depth to them and are inspired by both the geometry of Islamic art and the home-made craft of American folk art.
Isabel Adonis at home, September 2019
THE ARTIST
Born in London, Isabel lived in the Sudan as a child before moving to Wales at the age of nine. As a child she made fabric dolls and as a teenager began experimenting with quilting. In 2008 she found a canvas in a dustbin, took it home and made her first ever painting ‘Girl With Crow’.
Name Isabel Adonis
Born 1951
Lives Llandudno, Wales
Medium Fabric, paint, collage, mixed media
Education Educational Studies, Bangor University
Exhibitions Liverpool Academy of the Arts, Llandudno Library, Station Road Open Air Gallery
INTERVIEW
I’m Isabel Adonis, I’m an artist, a writer and an educator. I spend my day painting, writing and tutoring kids.
I first realised I was an artist in 2008 when I found a canvas in a dustbin on my way home from the shops. I put the canvas in the attic, hoping one of my daughters was going to paint on it but she didn’t, she wasn’t interested. And then I realised that it was for me, I’d brought it home for me. And then I started painting and I’ve been painting ever since.
My exhibition is about home and all all the things that go towards making a home. I was born in London and my father was an artist, he taught art in the Slade school in London, and my mother, I don’t really know what my mother did, she was just a Mum I think. My Dad used to paint in the front room and my mother used to take old cotton bags, rip them up and stick them on the wall so we could do painting. And that’s had a profound influence on me because much of my art is around being small and doing things in a childlike way.
When I was six we moved to Khartoum in the Sudan, and I fell in love with Islamic art. I think that’s probably had an influence on my artwork. In the Sudan I felt very free in a way I hadn’t felt in London. My sisters and I had long afternoons where we would create plays and make paper dolls. We used to make loads of paper dolls because we didn’t have any friends, so those paper dolls became our friends.
We used to wander around freely in the neighbourhood on our own, we were very much a family in our own right as children, without parents. I really liked the Mosques with the blue shining in the sun and I think that also comes upon my work, the geometric shapes.
I don’t think my parents were ever really there in a psychological sense; my father was very busy teaching History of Art in a college and when he came home in the afternoon he straight away went to his bedroom and started writing. So in a sense they weren’t there. My mother was always engaged in sewing and as children we had a very separate life. A Victorian life really.
My mother was principally a homemaker. She’d been brought up in an Orphanage and she’d lost her mother and her home when she was six in Bethesda. So everything she did was towards making a home but because she’d been orphaned, she created us as orphans, we became orphans in a family. It’s hard to explain but she wasn’t really looking after her needs she was always looking after our needs. And it was like being in care.
When I was nine my father decided we all needed to go school, we’d all had really random schooling up until then, so we moved to Llandudno in Wales, my mother had had another child by then, so there were five of us girls. And I went to a local primary school and then onto Grammar School. I was very bright, in the A-stream, but I didn’t like school at all. Looking back I was very shut down emotionally and I needed to express myself on my own terms. And that’s when I started making quilts out of scraps of material that my mother had left around.
One of main memories of growing up as a teenager in Wales was being looked after by my Mum’s sisters because my Mum was hardly ever there, she was with my father in Africa and we were looked after by my Mother’s mad Aunties. I was dying to have a home, I was dying to play the piano. I used to wander around my own looking in the windows where they’d have lights on, looking into other peoples’ home lives because I really wanted that.
I always wanted a home. All my life I wanted a home. I wanted to go back to London, I wanted to go back to Africa. I just wanted to go somewhere and find a home.
During my teenager years I began to make patchwork quilts, collecting little scraps and putting them together, and then later on when I was older I used to make pictures out of cloth, just little scenes with houses and flowers, that kind of thing. I did not really think much about it, I just used to do it.
When I was pregnant with my first child I used to carry around a little plastic bag with little bits of cloth, so when they were playing I’d get it out and start creating. I always wanted to make something and it was always about home life.
The crow, the image of the crow, is really important to me because it signifies my ethnic origin, it’s dark, but it also is a nod towards my spiritual life, my inner life. Black men on slave ships were called crows and there’s also the Welsh mythology, the Crow God, so it’s all got various meanings and I’ve started to put them on all my paintings now.
I put in all the scraps from around the house, old bills and things, I put images of houses and I put the crows, which means a lot to me. And people like it, people feel inspired because it’s not really perfect at all. They think ‘Ooh, I can do that’ and they go away and do it, and I love that.