Isabel MacCarthy
Alien
10-24 May 2025
Isabel MacCarthy’s photographs are exercises in alienation: the array of worldly (human or nonhuman) subjects in this show have transformed, through MacCarthy’s sumptuous manipulation of colour and light, into a set of otherworldly images. In this process, everything becomes flesh: the wrinkled leather of a couch, the network of stems that sprawl out of a courgette plant, the undulating metal of an engine. Even when she captures a human subject, we remain locked out of any sense of interiority.
And yet the process of transforming these captured surfaces into printed photographs is one of extreme intimacy — although the camera can function as a barrier between photographer and subject, a deep and vital connection is restored during the long stretches in the darkroom when MacCarthy loads her images up with the luminescence that haunts these fragmented bodies, plants, and objects.
Through this process, photography becomes a primary means by which MacCarthy reckons with the alienating effects of grief after the death of her mother three years ago — grief at once separates one from the world and lends one an extraordinary vulnerability that can be the vehicle for new and durable connection to it. MacCarthy’s work navigates this paradox through the tension between photography’s inherent separation of artist and viewer from subject and its ability to expose, and give unique expression to, the unknowability of our world.
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Isabel MacCarthy is a London-based photographer. She completed her BA at Central Saint Martins in 2021. Her analogue practice involves portraiture, documentary and staged photography, and often engages themes of Love & loss and the many strands of connection between humans and nature. Throughout MacCarthy’s body of work, she aims to show what is lurking beneath the surface. Recent exhibitions include Marmalade (Greatorex Street, 2025); Love (Photo Book Café, 2025); Unconsumed (The Shoe Factory, Norwich, 2024); In the Water (Hackney Wick Bathhouse, 2024); Extension (Phoney, The Regency Town House, Brighton, 2023); The Worm at the Core (SET Woolwich, 2022).
Prices on Application. Please email sam@boldinggallery.com or esme@boldinggallery.com if interested.