Isabella Streffen, MA Fine Art

Graduated from Newcastle University

Selected by Rebecca Shatwell

Shooting The Light Fantastic, 2008

Artist statement

My MFA show interrogated the relationships between military vision, desire and possibility. Shooting The Light Fantastic presented three works that operate simultaneously as scopic regimes and devices for warfare. Using home-made transmitters, giant burning glasses, eye-motion capture hardware and a rocket fuelled with champagne, I explored the uses of technology for our own purposes, in the service of unknown narratives. 

I often use low-tech or expanded optical instruments to fragment, destabilise and reconstruct the processes of looking. Improvising with and subverting technologies and their histories is a key part of my practice, and I work in a way that is quite site-responsive, preferring to work between media, transforming/transliterating one thing into another.

My interest in invisible structures, frustration and intrigue is made evident within a practice that encompasses barely perceptible interruptive works including guerrilla projections and scent-works as well as large-scale installations and performative pieces. (Rebecca Shatwell, 2009)