Isabel Westlake is a multidisciplinary artist. Her practice explores opposing forces: weight and weightlessness, rigidity and softness, containment and collapse. She uses fabric to focus on themes of materiality and the physicality of sculpture in relation to the body. Inspired by Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, the work examines the visible and invisible structures that govern how we move, feel and endure.
In Suspensions, Westlake uses an industrial metal framework to support brightly coloured fabric forms, staging a tension between materials. The fabric — stretched, slumped or suspended — appears heavy in places, despite its lightness. This illusion plays with perception: what looks burdened is in fact buoyant, what seems solid is in fact fragile. Each joint and bracket becomes a site of negotiation, where support risks becoming a limitation. Through this choreography of structure and slump, the work invites the viewer to consider how grace might emerge not in spite of gravity, but through it.
Westlake graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a degree in Sculpture and Environmental Art.
