Isla Dowman’s practice embodies liminality, space, and human/nonhuman relationships. Her paintings use the canvas to facilitate queries about space by situating three-dimensional territories onto a flat plane.

In her current body of work, seals feature as a grounding force in the unsure environments she constructs. She views them as a model of liminality, continually traversing the boundaries of land and sea as solid beings. She positions them in spaces charged by dualities, operating simultaneously as inside and outside, man-made and natural, earth and water. Each dualism aims to disrupt the comfort of the surroundings, forcing the subjects to exist on a thread of intermediacy that obscures distinctions between domesticity and wilderness. She reinforces these spatial disruptions by permitting diluted paint to drip alongside harshly thick brushstrokes. By trespassing across textural boundaries, the paint reflects her desire to invade the borders of inside and outside.