About

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

Examining relationships between 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 resist fixed identity and function instead as both living creatures and embodied memory. Simultaneously chaotic and controlled, her compositions often use symmetry and repetition to create order within fragmentation, while color palettes drawn from photographs, environments, and objects tied to significant memories ground each painting in lived experience without restoring to narrative illustration.

Isabel's work rejects 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 entry point into art and academia. Drawing inspiration from botanical evolution, her plant-human hybrid subjects (or ‘orchid monsters’) adapt in response to threat, using mimicry, visual cues, and physical defense structures to deter predation.

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 experiences in an effort to investigate how memory is stored within images, objects, and the body.

Isabel’s work across mediums embraces contradiction to understand survival as a perpetual re-making of identity. Her 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 sexual violence.

Isabel received her BA in Art with Honors from Lafayette College in 2023 and is currently pursuing her MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. In 2024, she participated in NYC Crit Club's Canopy Program in a 10-person cohort led by NYC-based painter Jennifer Coates, followed by Canopy 2.0 through May 2026 in a 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.)