Isabella Tessier Seeing the Unseen

Stanley Picker Print Tutor, Isabella Tessier presents her solo exhibition Seeing The Unseen at the Stanley Picker Gallery’s Project Studio.

Isabella Tessier was awarded with the Stanley Picker Print Tutorship 2025 for her project, The Unsettled Body, that explored an unfixed representation of the performing body, fluidly captured in print, drawing and motion capture. In her most recent body of work, undertaken at Kingston University, Isabella Tessier responds to artist and film maker, Paul Kaiser’s question: “What is human movement in the absence of the body?”

Seeing The Unseen presents an immersive, extended reality artwork that reimagines the relationship between digital trace and physical movement. Seen through the lens of a VR headset, motion become material and traces left by the gestures of an artist and dancer are made visible.

As viewers navigate the space, their own gestures generate new traces, layering and transforming the artwork into a shared, temporal map of motion, a living drawing. The exhibition invites the audience to experience an embodied ecology where observer and artwork are connected through presence, absence, and the choreography of interaction.

This project has been made in collaboration with Kingston University’s iLab. Senior Immersive Digital Technician at Kingston University, Matthew Boardman, and Dancer, Eloise Frey.

Private View and Performance on the Thursday 29 May 5-7 PM

Workshops for groups available to be booked with the gallery.

Biography

Isabella Tessier is an interdisciplinary artist whose collaborative practice is at the intersection of technology, performance and print. She creates embodied translations of performative movement working between dynamics of touch and absence, movement and trace, applying Didi-Huberman’s concept of ‘unease in representation’ to the expanded field of print. Her work sits between figuration and abstraction and contemplates how line can capture the body in time and space. Isabella Tessier is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, member of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers and recipient of the Rosemary Simmons Lithography Award.