Isabella Morales Salis

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Isabella Morales Salis

FIGURATIVE PAINTINGS - FINE ART PRINTS - ART EXHIBITIONS

03/09/2026

NOTES ON BEING SLOW {WHILE IN CAPITALISM}
3/sept/2026

After my trip to Brazil I took several days to do nothing but be in my studio, paint and also, me and my friend Ken Nwadiogbu have our studios in the same building so we talked a lot about art and life, not to mention I had mental space to also talk with my beloved best friends on the phone artist lu__say and activist ❤️
I read books and wrote weird essays. I mainly observed life around me, including the mornings I stayed in my new garden. I needed to recharge, my neurospicy brain demands this from time to time. […]

As the days passed I think I befriended a spider that lives in my garden table. I also enjoyed every bit of nature everyday I walked to my studio, breathing heavily when looking at plants, people and the sky. When I come home I watched a lot of true crime documentaries and movies, as I always had a curiosity about why people have extreme behaviours. Maybe if I wasn’t an artist I could be a criminal psychologist or a detective, although I could never in my life imagine myself being in the police force. […]

I noticed I couldn’t read one book only, so I slowly read many different pages of many books I have about feminism, ecology and specially a few books Clarice Lispector wrote. I’m happy to know her style of writing is like mine, almost like a stream of consciousness that is poetic and philosophical. Dostoyevsky is nothing in comparison to her.
I have been dealing for years now with my health, because of specific problems my body is always is in pain. It makes me stronger because I have no option but to be strong. It is like grief, is always there and it teaches to continue. […]

I have been paying more attention to birds recently, and read somewhere that in many indigenous and ancient cultures they are considered animals that carry messages between worlds as well being ancestors, or spirits. In my new garden there is a wild tree that grows grapes, I did my research and discovered they are called Isabella, my name. Maybe this is a sign, who knows?
I appreciate when birds come to this tree while I’m sat in my hammock, because maybe they are carrying people that I love that are no

12/07/2026

Glad to be part of a group talk with amazing artists, organised by VOICED

This Artist talk was for a group exhibition called Beyond Belonging that happened at Republic, London.

02/07/2026

“A água me contou muitos segredos”

2026
24 x 30 cm
Discarded denim fabric and acrylic paint on wood panel

I keep thinking about the Brazilian caiman. Not because I simply like the animal, but because I think they are misunderstood. They can seem aggressive, but in truth they are gentle creatures (between themselves). They care for their family, their young, they are protectors. They cuddle one another. They are intelligent, watchful, always reading their environment before they act. They stay quiet, and only roar when they truly need to be heard. They are true to themselves.

I don’t know why, but I keep seeing myself and my father in this animal. I understand things by association, by finding meanings and connections that no one else would think to find. I analyse my dreams, and my own history, through beings that are not human, maybe because I’m tired of a world that centers itself only on the human, or maybe because I simply need a new way of seeing the world. And so I keep asking myself: how does a caiman see this world? Perhaps it isn’t so different from our own. Maybe we should ask these kind of questions more often. How does this being, that is not me, feel?

28/06/2026

“The past never left”

2026
24 × 30 × 0.5 cm
Discarded denim fabric and oil paint on wood panel

This work grew out of thinking about where I come from and what that place carries (and what I carry). Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil, is a complicated inheritance: indigenous and European, colonised and coloniser. From that painful and rich history came the gaucho culture, and it lives in us there, every day. Our histories layered into the land itself.
Into everyday life. Into our ways of being.

This piece was on view at OYSTER

Song by the gaúcha singer Elis Regina, “Como nossos pais” (translates to “like our parents”)

26/06/2026

Thank you everyone who came to the exhibition I was part of, OYSTER

These are some pictures I took myself.

I appreciate my friends that found the time and strength to visit there, even with the heatwave! I put loads of work in my art and is always amazing to see that people like it ❤️

I exhibited three pieces, one being a collection of small paintings. Soon will be posting about each of them!

The theme for the pieces was to do with my Latinidade. How no matter where I am I carry it with me. 🇧🇷

Till next one! Which is soon. ✨

25/06/2026

“Guaraná e bolo de chocolate”

2026
24 × 30 × 0.5 cm
Discarded denim fabric and oil paint on wood panel

This piece is about my childhood. Or about how I felt as a child. Specially when my family would get together to have snacks at the table outside. It’s been a long time but I carry this version of myself with me.

This piece was on view at OYSTER

17/06/2026

I have been sitting with a few books lately. Quilombismo by Abdias do Nascimento (a book about political and spiritual model for collective liberation, rooted in African diasporic resistance), The Living Goddess by Marija Gimbutas and Lady of the Beasts by Buffie Johnson, which explore pre-capitalist, pre-colonial European societies and their relationship to nature, community, and the sacred.

What I found in reading them together is something I had felt for a long time but could not yet name. That the disconnection I experience here in the UK and Europe is not just cultural difference. It is the result of a specific history. One where empire first erased relational ways of living in Europe, then exported that erasure to the rest of the world through colonisation and capitalism.

South American and African diasporic cultures carried something that survived that erasure. This essay is part of my attempt to understand what that something is, and why it matters now.

This is also part of my ongoing research as a multidisciplinary artist. I write about these ideas in my newsletter. If you want to follow the thinking as it develops, you can subscribe for free at isabellamoralesstudio.uk or find me on Substack

05/06/2026

I got the scholarship to study MA Contemporary Arts at the Royal College of Arts in London! Not too long ago I was accepted in Arts & Humanities but decided to apply again to CAP, and for my surprise was also accepted! And NOW I just got the scholarship!!! I am screaming inside ❤️ of happiness.

Life is good.

03/06/2026

Thank you for everyone that came to the group exhibition I was part of, Theatre of Fated Dreams, at OXO Gallery.

I had such a great time and I was so impressed with so much really good art, conversations and community.

Thank you and for curating it!

18/05/2026

This painting began with a question I keep returning to: what actually separates us from other animals, from each other, from the land we come from? I was thinking about ancient societies that did not draw the same lines we draw now, between human and animal, between the sacred and the everyday, between self and nature. Those ways of relating feel truer to me than what we have now. I was also moving through my own q***rness at the time, and finding that nature itself is q***r, that it has never been fixed or binary, that it shifts and merges and refuses category the way the figures in my painting do. Jung was present too, the idea that we use myth and imagination not to escape reality but to make sense of it, and that the parts of ourselves we don’t yet understand often speak through image before they speak through words. This work tries to hold all of that without resolving it.

We Are All Connected, 2025

Soon showing in an exhibition I will post about it.

oil on canvas, 80 x 115 cm
price on request

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