Isabelle Klauder is a local contemporary artist based in Hendersonville, North Carolina. She is a painter who has abandoned the traditional white canvas in favor of patterned fabrics and textiles. Her large-scale oil paintings on patterned fabrics offer visual representations of the grief experience that was incurred after the loss of her mother.
“In 2014, I received my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Figurative Painting from the University of North Carolina in Asheville. I had already been seduced by oil paint as a medium, but it was during my time in college that I fell in love with figurative painting. Working with live models was new, exciting, and endlessly challenging.
In 2013, I was planning and organizing my first solo gallery show while preparing to graduate when my mother unexpectedly passed away. I was devastated. She had a profound influence on my life. She taught me how to sew from a young age; she filled our home with bright colors and collected obscure artworks. She was Martha Stewart, meets Gwen Stefani. She was bright, bold, and had an infectious laugh. Over the years, we picked out a lot of patterned fabric together, with shared aspirations of wielding the sewing machines to make funky throw pillows, handbags, and decorative household accents.
After her death, part of my self-identity felt lost and misplaced; my sense of self had shifted amongst the concentric waves of grief and anguish that I was enduring. To contend with the void shaped by the loss of my mother, I turned to painting and began experimenting with painting on the patterned fabric we had picked out and incorporating elements of sewing and quilting that she had taught me.”
The work that emerged is a collection of large-scale self-portraits where the female figure is intertwined with repeating botanical motifs and floral patterns, creating a rich visual tapestry that celebrates the human form and speaks to the complex ways in which we cope with loss by experiencing our inner and outer worlds simultaneously.
Klauder’s work draws attention to the often-overlooked role of textiles in women’s work. Generationally, textiles have been intimately tied to women’s work, creativity, and economic independence. From embroidery to quilting, textiles have provided women with a medium for record keeping, memory-making, and self-expression as a way to connect across time and space. Klauder’s use of sewing and hand-stitching extends beyond the surface of the work; paintings are sometimes accompanied by idioms and words of wisdom that make for suggestive titles and take the form of sewn fabric letters. The fabricated idioms create a sense of timelessness and invites viewers to contemplate the ways in which we move in and out of different stages of life and the ways in which we are shaped by our experiences.
Klauder’s work offers a unique perspective and asks thought-provoking questions about how we perceive time, how we cope with grief, and what it means to pass in and out of life. Her artwork affirms that grief is a universal human experience that spans across time. Not only can art-making offer a lifetime to soothe emotional suffering and the sorrow of being left behind, but the paintings she has created have the ability to act as a symbolic tether to her departed mother. She’s created a visual language that speaks to our shared humanity and serves as a reminder that there is always beauty to be found in even the most challenging moments of life.
