In Caving, the left field is not governed by a single material logic, but by a tension between weightlessness and hardness. The cloud-like forms register an unbounded affective atmosphere; the bats and numbers retain the hard symbolic quality Wood repeatedly draws from ornament, ceramics, and object-culture. When they occupy the same planar field, Wood allows “emotional vapor” and “cultural imprint” to coexist without resolving each other: light and heavy; private and historically marked—an articulation deeply consistent with Wood’s own internal perceptual register.
The upper right quadrant uses her signature close-up treatment of garment / leather surfaces. Folds and highlights become hyper-focused: the clothing loses all function and becomes an unnameable skin. Here she is not painting fashion; she is painting the way desire begins—through surface.
The lower right bird head is no longer rendered as biological life, but converted into “black material.” Its feathers read like fur, like industrial leather. It is not “alive and looking at us,” but a surface reflecting back at us.
The work therefore does not produce narrative; it shows the moment when looking becomes material-driven.
When air (clouds), symbolic residue (bats and numbers), and the sensorial skin of desire (fabric, black shine) are compressed into one surface—we are made to inhabit Issy Wood’s perceptual mode:
she does not sense the world by category, but by the intensity of surface.
The viewer is forced to exit object-based seeing, and enter her mode of sensing: three different surface-regimes interfering with one another, where affect and material, body and cultural trace, continuously cross over. This dislocation and superimposition of material logic is where the spiritual rigor of this work resides.