Isabel Paget

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Isabel Paget (b. 2000, England), featured in AQ Volume VI, is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice navigates the thresholds between permanence and impermanence, using sculpture to examine how time, perception, and identity warp under pressure.

Graduating with First-Class Honours from Central Saint Martins, Paget has developed a research-driven practice informed by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Albert Einstein, and Buckminster Fuller. Combining philosophy, science, and engineered forms, she creates works that interrogate the structural and psychological tensions of contemporary life – focusing on how perception, identity, and time are stretched and fractured by the accelerating forces of technological evolution.

A turning point came in 2023 when she exhibited Revolve, an interactive sculpture at Burning Man. The impermanence of a temporary, participatory community became a living laboratory for her exploration of time’s instability. This encounter expanded her understanding of sculpture as both spatial and temporal, deepening her commitment to creating works that challenge perception and invite active engagement.

Her 2024 solo exhibition Rhizome expanded on these ideas, examining how successive industrial revolutions — from the steam engine to artificial intelligence — have redefined humanity’s relationship with time. The exhibition explored the tension between human perception and technological acceleration, constructing a charged environment where viewers confronted the elasticity of reality itself.

Paget’s ongoing practice occupies the in-between spaces, where questions outweigh answers, cracks reveal what lies beneath the surface of perception, and the potential for collapse opens the door to new ways of seeing and being.


www.isabelpaget.com

What inspired you to become an artist, and how did you decide to commit to this path?

I’ve never accepted things at face value; making became my way of continuing to ask questions. Art evolved into the only language expansive enough to hold all of my contradicting obsessions, like logic and emotion, or physics and philosophy. Committing to this path wasn’t a decision so much as a recognition: this is how I think and engage with the world.


Could you share the story or concept behind your recent work?

In my recent work Sands of Time, a steel globe houses seven intersecting hourglasses. This piece for me was about creating an opportune moment, like when paths in life cross and a single decision can change the course of your life forever. The intersecting hourglasses became a way to materialize that pause; an invented form that holds the weight of a moment when everything can change.


What role does experimentation and exploration play in your artistic practice?

Experimentation is everything: testing limits, responding to resistance, and staying open to the unexpected. The studio feels like a laboratory where I ask materials questions like: how much pressure can this hold? What happens if I push this too far? I rarely end up where I thought I would, and that drift, that moment of discovery, is what keeps the work alive.


What message do you hope your art conveys to the world?

I like to think my work opens space for reflection on how we are shaped by what we cannot see: time, pressure, systems, memory. I hope it offers a pause, a question, or a shift in perspective. I’m less interested in delivering a message than in holding up a mirror that’s slightly warped; one that invites the viewer to challenge their sense of reality, even just momentarily.


Share a mantra or favourite quote that keeps you going.

"If you feel safe in the area you're working in, you're not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting." — David Bowie