about isissa
Isissa is a mixed-media artist, designer, and maker working primarily in clay, on paper, and with space. She crafts tools and experiences that support living at the pace of presence as a strategy for personal and collective liberation. Her work dwells in the liminal — those in-between states where transformation quietly unfolds, deeply informed by both the challenges and the gifts of her mixed-race and Afro-Caribbean identities.
Her practice has been honored with fellowships, grants, and residencies from Penland School of Craft; Artists’ Literacies Institute; the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA); Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts; Township 10; and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. Her work is exhibited nationally.
Previously, Isissa served as Exhibitions Director at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, and as Exhibitions Manager and Designer for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Today, exhibition design is a central channel of her creative work. She collaborates with museums and cultural institutions to shape immersive storytelling spaces that invite thoughtful engagement with Black creativity, histories, and cultures.
Isissa currently makes art and home in the mountains of Western North Carolina. She enjoys meditating, carpentry, and meandering in nature’s rhythms — rituals that nourish presence, foster attunement to beauty, and continually return her to what truly matters.
artist statement
My art practice lives at the intersection of craft, design, and collective healing. I create tools and objects that facilitate processes of change. My ceramic ritual vessels and paper-based works guide journeys into in-between states where possibility and potential arise. By working across mediums, I offer diverse paths for slowing down, reflection, and personal transformation.
I am deeply invested in the vessel as both form and concept. Whether shaped in clay or realized through other materials, my work considers how vessels — literal or implied — hold memory, story, and spirit. They become sites of containment and becoming, intimate architectures that support us through liminal states and threshold moments.
Rooted in my mixed-race, Black queer identity, my practice understands in-betweenness not as fragmentation but as generative space. Shaped by diasporic histories and layered belonging, I work through assembly as a method of recomposition — bringing fragments into deliberate relationship until they form cohesive, self-possessed wholes. My pieces embody the beauty of identities that belong fully to themselves, even while carrying multiple lineages.
Through luminous surfaces, tactile finishes, and balanced compositions, my work stages spaces of quiet devotion and playful ceremony. Glossy layers, soft neutrals, and saturated bursts of color integrate opposites — bold and delicate, monumental and intimate, whimsical and precise — allowing harmony and tension to coexist. Each piece expands what function can mean, offering vessels for reflection, ritual, and emotional life.
