About

Isabel Sorrells (b. 2001) is a Connecticut-based artist using oil painting and printmaking to investigate survival as an ongoing process of transformation.

Engaging with themes of beauty, desire, objectification, and violence, Isabel's paintings deconstruct and reconfigure images of plants, flowers, and her own body into ambiguous tangles of limbs and flesh, blurring lines between figurative and botanical forms to produce 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 to impose order upon fragmentation. Color plays a central role in Isabel's work; palettes drawn from photographs, environments, and objects tied to significant memories ground each painting in lived experience without restoring to explicit narrative illustration. Isabel's work seeks to reject the glorification of sexual violence and objectification of the nude female form in the Western 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 illustration as an alternative entrypoint into art-making and academia. Drawing inspiration from her fascination with botanical evolution, her plant-human hybrid subjects (or ‘orchid monsters’) adapt in response to threat, using mimicry, visual cues, and physical defense structures to ward off predators.

Isabel’s printmaking practice engages with similar themes, exploring violence, identity, and transformation through layered archival photographs, often incorporating dimensional processes and impressions of objects associated with formative memories in an effort to investigate how memories are stored within images, objects, and the body. Her work across mediums embraces contradiction to understand survival as a perpetual re-making of identity. Isabel’s interest in creating images in which opposing forces—turbulence and restraint, beauty and the grotesque, past and present–-coexist and interact generates a visual tension that mirrors the paradoxes of endurance in the aftermath of life-altering experiences of sexual violence.

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.)