Isabel Yellin: Mothership
Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art
Saturday, January 11–Sunday, March 30, 2025
Over the last decade, Isabel Yellin has earned a reputation for fabric sculptures sewn into serpentine shapes suggestive of the body. The works in Mothership, her debut solo museum exhibition, mark a material turn in her practice, presenting restless silicone paintings and metal-and-silicone sculptures that oscillate between divergent tendencies: hard and soft, tight and loose, wall and floor, freedom and containment. Rooted in the language of abstraction, these works continue to summon the corporeal, but also expand to suggest the ethereal, creating a visual language for Yellin’s investigation into the psyche.
The unruly lines in Yellin’s paintings and sculptures allude to the work of other artists, a pantheon that by Yellin’s own estimation includes Magdalena Abakanowicz, Olga Balema, Nairy Baghramian, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Senga Nengudi, among many others who similarly engage line’s propensity to evoke both body and psyche. Similar to Abakanowicz, Bourgeois, and Hesse, Yellin approaches sculpture by distilling and intensifying form as a means of working through personal and collective trauma.
Yellin’s current project gives form to the experience of grief and the impulse to protect our most vulnerable parts in the wake of profound loss. For Mothership, Yellin renders this loss explicit, by pairing her work for the first time with that of her mother, Anne Locksley, who died by suicide in 2008. Yellin produced her latest body of work in direct response to the recent rediscovery of Locksley’s paintings. This exhibition offers an opportunity for Yellin to honor her mother as a guiding force in her life and work, allowing these two artists to speak to each other across the expanse of time and space that has separated them since Locksley’s passing.
Installation images: Joshua Schaedel
Individual images: Paul Salveson
