One Photographer’s Deeply Personal Meditation on Love and Grief

Nothing is more alienating than losing someone you love. But grief also has a funny way of jolting the world into new focus – of making you see very clearly what matters in life, and what doesn’t. It’s something Isabel MacCarthy knows well. Her mum died just as she was graduating from Central Saint Martins. “I was suddenly really aware of how short life is, and I just wanted to do the thing that I love doing,” the artist says over video call from a small, dimly-lit cupboard in her photography studio. “Since I was a teenager, I’ve always shot my friends, but photography became a way to hold on to everything and not let it go.”

MacCarthy grew up on a farm in coastal Norfolk, spending most evenings after school mucking around on the beach with her brother. Her first proper camera, a vintage 35mm point and shoot, was gifted to her by her friend Penny when she was 16. “She was an eBay queen”, the artist says with a generous laugh. But it was when she met her boyfriend the summer her mum died, a fellow artist, Cristiano Di Martino, that she started approaching her work with a new seriousness. “I feel like he shielded me from all the darkness that was to come,” she says. “He’s a sculptor, I guess that’s one of the reasons I fell in love with him. He saw me as the artist I wanted to be, but didn’t quite have the courage to be yet.”

Several years on, and the visual universe MacCarthy has formed will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Casting an otherworldly gaze upon things we overlook every day – a special kind of attention, no doubt, sharpened by grief – her work blends documentary shots of people close to her, cinematic staged portraiture, and abstracted experiments in still life. Manipulating light and shadow with sumptuous effect, behind her camera bodies course with energy, plants quiver and dance, and inanimate objects become portals to other worlds. 30 of these stirring scenes are gathered in her new exhibition, Alien, which opens this weekend at emerging gallery Bolding’s second location in Marylebone.  

MacCarthy has been working on the show since January, but the picture that started it all was taken back in 2018. Captured in the Polish countryside in the dead of night, it captures the lower half of her friend Ella’s naked body jumping through tall green crops, her skin wet and shimmering in the moonlight. “It’s the first photo I truly fell in love with,” MacCarthy says. “We were 20 and staying in the middle of nowhere in a caravan, swimming, wandering about, drinking vodka and being silly. I’ve always thought it was quite an alien, strange thing.”

From this starting point, Alien contemplates what it means to exist in a fragile human body, the shifting nature of memory, and the unseen energies that connect us to nature. “If you look at the human body in a different way, you can see your hand as a claw, or pull the skin and it stretches,” MacCarthy explains. “We’re so strange, and we don’t completely understand ourselves. Through photography, I’m trying to understand myself, the people around me, and how everything is connected.”

The images are sensitively sequenced in the newly established gallery space, which has found an unlikely home inside the four-story Alfies Antiques Market off Lisson Grove. “I feel protected by all the other things around it,” says the artist. “My work suits a bit of an odd location.” She worked closely with Bolding curatorial duo, Esme Blair and Sam Lincoln, on its configuration. “Isabel’s Alien is our fifth show, and we are thrilled how it exemplifies her as an artist,” the pair say. “She works with a variety of subjects, and one key thread for the Alien show is her exploration of these subjects’ interconnectivity in the darkroom. We wanted to select photographs that had a shared luminosity and that generated a sense of otherworldliness. Isabel speaks often about how this effect parallels the dissociative effects of grief – which has, paradoxically, enabled her to find tremendous moments of strange beauty in the world.”

Seen all together, the works in Alien reveal MacCarthy to be an artist who feels things deeply, who uses her practice to search for meaning beyond what we see. “I do believe in the spirit world,” she says. “I guess I try to connect with my mum. I’ve had some strange experiences. I was driving along in Norfolk, coming over a hill near where she was buried. Over the radio came this song which was sung at her funeral. It was just such a weird, gorgeous moment. I drove to her grave and sat there for a while. Ever since I did that, I’ve felt a bit lighter, knowing that [the people we lose] are around in whatever form it is.” 

She hopes the exhibition will inspire a similar openness in those who see it. “I hope it makes people look with more care,” she says. “If you pay attention, you can see other things – whether it’s an eye in a tree or plants dancing. I [also hope it’s] really clear that my work revolves around love. My relationship with my mum was very close, we gave each other a lot of love. I love photography, and I photograph the people and things I love.”

Alien by Isabel MacCarthy is on show at Bolding Gallery (Ground Floor, Alfies Antique Market, 13 - 25 Church St) in London from 10 – 24 May 2025.