Isabella Covert

Isabella Covert is a painter born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2001. She received a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2023 and is currently a MFA Candidate and Graduate Fellowship recipient at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Covert’s works comment on the mental complexities women and people who can become pregnant experience due to the state of reproductive rights in America through the lens of body horror. She has shown in exhibitions in galleries across the US including Chicago, Illinois, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Manhattan, New York. Covert currently lives and works in Savannah, GA.

Referencing the space of sustained anxiety surrounding reproductive and overall health, my work provokes the interconnected systems of control that permeate sensations. Communicating the interplay of excess political control and gendered dynamics, these fleshy masses combine the rawness of muscle and meat with lived experiences of women. Employing mediums such as painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, my work attempts to dismantle the entanglement of self in relation to the regulating authority overwhelmingly present in the Information Age. Bodily autonomy is lost in a cacophonous void that builds and distorts our perception of self. Referencing the genre of bodily horror and its relationship to structural tendencies, my work dissects the connection between the inhuman, speculative horror, and social relations that impact the body and mind. By dismembering and rearranging, these works reframe the reproducing body as a psychological sum of parts, instead of merely a vessel.Through interdisciplinary work, I delve into themes of subverting socio-political structures, challenging the confines of womanhood, and activist work that transcends the corporeal, disrupts our surroundings, and critiques the systems in place. Creating a space of communication, my work considers the way in which people that can become pregnant disjointedly manage and conduct life, and how to reshape agency.Referencing the continuing history of the connotations between women’s emotional responses and hysteria, my work serves as a current zeitgeist, showing personal narratives that speak to the greater collective. 

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