Donna Isham is a multidisciplinary artist whose work fuses abstraction, figurative expression, and immersive installation and sculpture to explore the emotional and psychological terrain of the human experience. With a cinematic sensibility and a background in film, she constructs visual environments that are at once intimate and expansive drawing the viewer into a world shaped by memory, vulnerability, and transformation. Isham’s practice is centered around themes of transformation, vulnerability, memory, and resilience.
In her paintings and sculptures, Isham employs abstraction not as an escape from the real, but as a way to distill its emotional essence. Through bold coloration, gestural mark making and fragmented figuration, she conjures iconographic images that suggest spirituality, transcendence, and the alchemy of personal evolution. Her recurring motifs of fractured bodies, ethereal figures, shifting light, and geometric shape evoke a liminal space between the physical and the metaphysical.
Her acclaimed Alchemy Collection, featuring works such as Le Cirque, We Are All Watching, and Glass Between Us, integrates original paintings, 3D animation, projection mapping, and soundscape to create enveloping experiences that move beyond the visual into the emotional and spiritual. These installations often act as emotional thresholds, immersing viewers in symbolic landscapes that speak to the fractured beauty of modern life.
Working in the tradition of artists like Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, and Cecily Brown, Isham draws from a lineage of women who navigate the body, psyche, and the sacred through material and image. Yet her voice is unmistakably her own, contemporary, emotionally resonant, and unapologetically honest.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and internationally and is held in private and corporate collections. Isham continues to attract collectors, curators, and galleries who seek work that is visually arresting, conceptually rigorous, and deeply human.
"...her rich and exuberant paintings embody the vulnerabilities of existence and an innate, collective desire to see our experiences as humans in the rendered mark." - Whitehot Magazine
"Isham's work creates an open, limitless highway that reminds of the multitudes that make us human and individuals. In this way, there is a most satisfying connection created between viewer and artist; an irresistible invitation into a deeper conversation..." Whitehot Magazine
"Isham's work becomes a catalogue of the human experience that exists outside of any time, space or cultural moment: rather, their timelessness presents a collective picture of humans in emotional, passionate, and earnest stances that we can all relate to, that bind us as a species and not as mere things to be labeled." - LA Weekly
"Donna Isham's figurative works are naked, raw and beautiful. She utilizes live models, photographs and a variety of materials from oil and acrylic to charcoal and pastels in order to create a more visceral impact." - Digital Journal
"Donna Isham's canvases are bold and honest, figurative and abstract. Seeing the female from from a woman's point of view is evocative and emotional." - Yesterday's Island