IN MY IMAGE
In My Image explores painting as a space where memory stirs rather than settles; where the past flickers in fragments, half-remembered and half-imagined. Working with found and family photographs, I use paint to blur the edges between recognition and forgetting, allowing images to dissolve into feeling. I’m interested in how memory resists clarity; how it shifts, fades, and reawakens through emotion rather than certainty.
There’s a quiet undercurrent of place that runs through my work: landscapes felt more than seen, a sense of belonging that carries both tenderness and unease. I’m drawn to how nostalgia and attachment can comfort, but also confine; how love of what’s familiar sometimes conceals tension and loss. In this space, painting becomes a way to sit with those contradictions, to hold them gently without resolving them.
By weaving found and familial images together, I unsettle the idea of the archive as a site of certainty. Memory becomes porous here: an image once familiar becomes strange, and a stranger’s photograph feels like home.
This is a meditation on the emotional life of memory. It asks how the past continues to live within us, not as something complete, but as a shifting constellation of feeling, absence, and return.
Isabelle Hacon (b. 2004) is an emerging artist from northwest Queensland, now based in Naarm/Melbourne. Working primarily in oil painting, her practice is shaped by the landscapes and family histories of her rural upbringing. Through layered and reworked imagery drawn from familial and found photographs, Hacon explores memory as something fluid; where intimacy and distance, presence and loss, quietly intertwine.
https://www.instagram.com/evidence.of.issy/