ishbelangusart
ArtEvol 2025 / Ishbel Angus
Witch in a Bottle Series 1 , 2025 Oil and acrylic on wood panels Each 30 × 41 × 5 cm
Ishbel Angus is a London-based artist who completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. Angus juxtaposes the cryptic and the hyperreal, presenting paintings as vessels. Queerness is placed at the centre, using painting to define the undefined and to investigate tensions between the known and unknown. Materiality is blended through painted and real objects used as interventions, producing illusionistic effects that challenge the boundaries of surface. Painting becomes an act of archiving and legitimisation, offering form to the unfixed. Angus reimagines objects not as passive symbols but as active participants in queerness.
Artwork Introduction
Witch in a Bottle Series 1 is inspired by an artefact called Witch in a Bottle , currently held in the Pitt Rivers Museum, found around 1912 in Sussex, England. Ishbel Angus has maintained a long-lasting fascination with this object, often wondering what is inside the shiny reflective bottle. The work reflects on this question, using toy ‘geo-magnets’ and balloons to fit a witch in a bottle and physically re-create the artefact as a form of research and understanding. Through this logic, the bottle becomes the balloon, and the magnets become the witch. The work examines boundaries, categories and what freedom in restriction can look like through a queer feminist lens, using painting as both legitimation and ‘artefacting’ of queer experience.
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