About

Isabel Sorrells (b. 2001) is a Connecticut-based artist whose oil paintings investigate the impact of her experience as a sexual assault survivor on the intersecting relationships between her body, sexuality, and sense of identity. Engaging with themes of beauty, fear, violence, and desire, Isabel's paintings deconstruct and reconfigure fragmented images of plants, flowers, and her own body into ambiguous tangles of limbs and flesh, blurring lines between figurative and botanical forms to create subjects that function as both embodied memories and living, autonomous creatures, resisting fixed identity. Simultaneously chaotic and controlled, her compositions reference elements of design and architecture, often employing symmetry and repetition impose order and structure upon a fragmented sense of self. Color plays a central role in Isabel's work; palettes drawn from photographs, environments, and objects tied to the experiences that drive her conceptual ideation ground each painting in the memory, sensation, or conflict it explores.

Isabel's work rejects the glorification of sexual violence and objectification of the nude female form in the art historical canon, engaging instead with the role of women artists in the history of both figurative and still-life flower painting, their exclusion from the academic painting sphere, and their turn towards botanical painting and drawing as an alternative entry point to academia and art-making. Drawing inspiration from her fascination with botanical evolution, Isabel’s plant-human hybrid subjects (or ‘orchid monsters’) adapt in response to threat, borrowing survival strategies from the natural world and using mimicry, visual cues, and physical defense structures to ward off predators.

Isabel’s paintings embrace contradiction—grotesque yet beautiful, alluring yet unsettling, turbulent yet restrained—as a means of understanding survival as an ongoing process of transformation, radical acceptance, and re-making identity. Her practice is guided by an exploration of what it means to be desired, to be objectified, to survive sexual violence--and most importantly, what it means to continue to exist, evolve, and desire in a body that has endured it--and when understanding is impossible, her work invites a viewer to sit within the strangeness of continued survival in the aftermath of experiences that feel world-ending.

Isabel received her BA in Art with Honors from Lafayette College in 2023. In 2024, she completed the Canopy Program through NYC Crit Club in a cohort led by NYC-based painter Jennifer Coates and is a current participant in a Canopy 2.0 cohort co-led by Matt Phillips and program founder Catherine Haggarty. Group exhibitions include Personal Effects at the Canopy Gallery in Chelsea, NYC (January 2025), Say it Loud! at Brookfield Craft Center in Brookfield, CT (August 2025), Remnants and Relics at Anonymous Society Gallery in Redding, CT (November 2025), FLASH at Anonymous Society Gallery in Redding, CT (December 2025), and Point Blanc x The Inner Circle NYC in Tribeca, NYC (January 2026.)