Isobel Craggs Alferoff

All of the landscapes which I insert myself into are in some way based on memory, constructed from my grandmother’s things and photographs from the Welsh countryside in which I grew up. Often, these scenes are a little rudimentary, ergonomic, almost drawn in. I paint myself in oils, encased within these landscapes, enclosed within a space which the outside world could hardly penetrate. This combination of the female nude and the natural world comes from a long-standing fascination with painters such as Rossetti. Half submerged and naked figures climb up and out of pools of water into the natural landscapes surrounding them in paintings such as ‘fell off my bike’, similarly to the nymphs which frequent Waterhouse’s paintings. Spider-crabs atop their head, headdress or amalgam, this half human, half sea-creature is something adjacent to the little mermaid from Hans Christian Andersons fairytales, an illustrated copy of which was central to my childhood and now my artistic practice.