Isabelle Maschal O’Donnell

Isabelle Maschal O’Donnell was born 1994 in San Diego, California and currently lives and works in Portland, Maine. Her work uses textiles and craft techniques as a means to explore and question painting abstraction. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Maine College of Art, and has exhibited throughout New England as well as in New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin at venues including Able Baker Contemporary, Boston University Stone Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. Her work has been published in ArtMaze Magazine and Friend of the Artist, and she has attended residencies at the Stephen Pace House and Hewnoaks Artist Colony.

Isabelle's work is concerned with pattern, color, and texture, as well as the continuing conversations concerning materiality and textiles as a means to explore and question painting abstraction. She draws influence from her personal history, traditional fiber processes, the natural world, and the saturated palette of mass produced consumer products. She situates herself as an artist within a growing lineage of contemporary painters whose work deals with painting’s intrinsic connection to textiles and craft, exploring its conceptual implications regarding feminism and labor, process and material, and pattern and ornamentation.  Her work continues and expands upon these explorations through the combination and contrast of the varying mediums and processes of textiles and painting. This is visible through her use of both traditional and non-traditional painting surfaces and techniques in combination with textiles processes such as weaving, dyeing, and sewing. She seeks to combine these varying processes, materials, and motifs in order to acknowledge their correlations and explore the histories and disciplines that have shaped her practice as a contemporary artist.