Isabella Diefendorf

As a process-oriented sculptor and installation artist, I choose to center my work on themes of community and caregiving. In my practice, it is important to me that I rely on and contribute to a network of individuals within my community. I am interested in the inextricability between process, care, and art. For me, care consists of paying attention to one’s natural and built environment - cracks in the road, the slow growth of seeds, sunlight through the trees, blocked by a plastic bag caught in its branches. Each of my works addresses an intimacy with my surroundings and the observed meaning thereof.

I am concerned with creating scenarios that exaggerate and emphasize the nuances of perceived normalcy using natural and ready-made material in conjunction with one another. Layering plastic waste over fallen branches, sewing with scrap yarn from my neighbor, handing out unused sidewalk chalk are ways in which my work holds the imprint of community. Focusing on objects that have been used and will be used again and circulating them throughout my neighborhood implicates a larger network of people in the work that I create. From the foundations of mutual aid, extra-capitalistic practice, and community, emerges a simple material vocabulary - made up of household and backyard items. As such, the work’s emphasis is placed on process, and metaphor. In continuing to address and explore familiar places in an unfamiliar way, my practice relies on natural elements such as wind, rain, light, gravity and growth to augment and edit my work.

Legibility is not something I am concerned with in the final products of my work, which are deeply process-oriented. They rely on a combination of shadow, sound, and light to convey a sensation of wonder and de-realization that allows the work to reveal the mundane in an unfamiliar way. Many of the pieces I create are, themselves, a reflection of both the social and introspective aspects of my lived practice. Imprints of work speak to what once was - an inside joke for those who were there to see it. Passersby or house guests may witness the project in what some would call a complete state, before the degradation of water, wind, heat, and cold make their mark. The sculptures would not be truly complete without the participation of the built and natural environment in which it was made. What is left of the work is not an attempt to preserve, but rather to showcase ephemerality in action.

To me, care is paying attention, paying attention is process, and that process is what creates my art. In creating a psychic space, wherein I can operate outside of the commercial, obtaining and returning material, I have created a studio in the world. By practicing in common spaces, both inside and outside the walls of my home, I am in dialogue with concepts of community, the natural world, and imprints of humanity both positive and negative.

Icework, 2023, yarn, ice, steel frame. dimensions variable, courtesy of the artist.