Isabelle Borges

For fifteen years, Isabelle Borges has been returning to a lake outside Berlin to look at the formal play of reed and branches emerging from, and reflected in, the water. It’s a site where the folding of space becomes tangible. The photographs she takes are the basis for largely abstract drawings, paintings, murals and installations — it’s a process she has mastered. Perhaps that’s why she turned to clay, a material completely new to her. To see what happens when the hands work in unfamiliar dimensions and the subconscious kicks in. The first pieces were odd, spontaneous shapes full of promise, anthropomorphous and architectural, bodies with windows and a presence inside. In contrast, a set of lustred angular pieces appear like slices of water, all surface and reflection. Gradually, Borges developed a more organic way of forming wall objects to explore and create spatiality, as she had hoped she would.