Clothes—and their capacity to signal status and dress up our feelings—appear regularly in Issy Wood’s paintings.
Cinched trenches, a bum-grazing mini, creased cowboy boots—these sartorial fixations speak to the London-based artist’s scrutiny of how we accessorize our lives to project power, self-possession, or availability. Wood haunts websites like Vogue Runway and e-commerce platforms like SSENSE or Farfetch to source the hermetic snapshots she interprets. “The way they photograph this clothing, there's a neediness to it,” she tells CULTURED over the phone. “There's a seduction already built in because they are trying to get you to own these items. They've already taken care of half the lighting for me, and I meet it halfway and either make it uglier than it appears on the website or just lean into how distressingly seductive it is.”
Wood also sees this digital scavenging as “a kind of tourism": She has been living with an eating disorder for over a decade, to which she attributes a late arrival to femininity, so the quest is also about “shopping for different kinds of women that I could be.” Clothing’s role as a container and canvas for reinvention is news to no one, but what Wood’s attired paintings provoke is the uneasy feeling of being caught in the act of lusting over what someone else has.
As London Fashion Week takes over her hometown, Wood sat down with CULTURED to unpack her sartorial DNA and what the art world makes of fashion.
