Issy Wood

Issy Wood describes herself as a “medieval millennial”—and this naming is not a self-branding strategy, but a literal articulation of her inner perceptual condition: she lives fully in the present, yet is persistently troubled by a sense of temporal displacement. Across painting, writing, and music, she works through an intensified near-field gaze: the skin of objects, the optical sheen of leather, ceramics, teeth, car interiors, black feathers. These images are never passive objects “to be seen,” but active surfaces that look back. Wood rejects “beauty” as the production of visual pleasure. By painting on velvet—materially close to a second skin—she exposes the darker underlayer of desire’s mechanism: softness turns sharp, familiarity turns alien.
What she disassembles is not the object itself, but the contemporary training of vision and desire—how looking is shaped, coded, and disciplined by culture and consumption. Her painting is an anti-narrative psychological operation: it does not offer a story; it exposes the condition under which seeing takes place. Without rage, yet with acute sensitivity, she presses a fundamental question: if the production of “beauty” is already a power logic, how can we still claim to look freely?