Isabel Lyckholm

Isabel Lyckholm was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Lived in Hertfordshire, UK; Eskilstuna and Gothenburg, Sweden; Beja, Portugal; and currently residing in Christchurch, NZ since 2001, where she paints from her home studio. She has a Fine Arts degree from Southampton University UK, Graduate Diploma in Applied Management from Ara, Master of Arts from Wintec and is currently embarking on Doctoral studies. Among her years of commissioned works, gallery ownership and as an exhibiting artist, group exhibitions include New Designers, London, with works held in collections at Eskilstuna Art Museum, Sweden, Long Beach Museum of Art, California, and St Richard Hospital, West Sussex, UK.

Describing herself as an Abstract expressionist, Lyckholm improvises her own gestural language of form and colour to project the emotional truths of the paintings. This follows across the gallery space as a removal from her body in an intensity of expression and experience. The imagery in the work is a vehicle in which the disc relates to the facets of an ever-evolving sense of identity and existence, while the grid act as a response to an environment whose basic structures we have long since internalised. By weaving together, the transitional diversity of her life and experiences with the multifaceted emergence of the social self, Lyckholm’s paintings navigate the complex reality of identity.

“I am compelled by the wordless and silent language of colour to give the elusive, intangible internal life an existence with form and vibrancy. It has always been the easiest way for me to reveal myself as it not only projects emotional truths away from the body, but offers a sense of connectedness to my environment and the surroundings that I find myself existing within. With the immediacy of paint, I can continually reinvent and reshape that identity and speak with a range of emotional responses through the quiet voice of layering paint on a canvas”.