Simone Isip is a fiber and community-based artist based in Brooklyn and Baltimore. Their work, a wide array of textile, installation, wearables, performance, and community organizing, is motivated by a desire for human connection amidst the complexities of navigating the presence and histories of colonialism, extraction, and exploitation. Exploring and utilizing material language, with an emphasis on the unconventional and outcast, they call attention to these intersecting experiences through visual metaphor. They’ve recently exhibited work at The Maryland Institute College of Art, Blanc Gallery in Quezon City, Philippines, Lakefest in Columbia, Maryland, and worked on costumes for national tours of The Comet Poppea and And Juliet with Dover Studio. Isip is currently a full-time student majoring in fibers at the Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD) and is set to graduate in spring 2026.

Personal Statement

In my world, chewed gum is the string that weaves a tapestry, pills are a mask through which we see the world, and a politician has three screaming newspaper heads. Engaging in the expansiveness of play and imagination, I investigate, and resituate objects regarded as mundane or of a single function in a mission to recontextualize and understand the human condition. Through explorations of material, scale, and repetition, I poke and prod at the constraints of reality, suggesting alternative futures that exist radically outside of our familiar societal constraints. My work, often activated through performance, relies on movement and proximity to the human body to explore and portray subject-object relationships both speculative and of the status-quo. I walk a line balancing between airy existentialism and a desire to connect and ground in the very moment before us all: My practice is highly reactive, emotionally responsive, and in tune to present happenings in which I both directly and indirectly experience. In confronting my own positionality, I open up the conversation of our individual and collective roles as both victims and perpetrators of the cycles of violence and trauma in which we all have been born into.