‘The Night Fox’ – Isobelle Carmody – bid is at $440

Isobelle is a passionate believer in the eternal importance of art and its ability to propagate the best of human nature.

Born in Wangaratta she could have scarcely imagined the places she would one day go. Now, she is able to dream of travelling to locations she has often already seen, perhaps only the Antarctic being an exception to that, for now…

Below Isobelle speaking at a special event at the Australian Embassy in Japan, to introduce her to the publishing world there.

She is a born story-teller, always animated and rather dramatic, with a somewhat self-effacing flair for humour. Of course, she has also had a lot of practice.The eldest of eight, she became story-teller in chief for her cohort of siblings, if nothing else, but to keep them quiet and still for a bit. This later translated to the page, as a method for her to process various heavy life and world events.

‘It was a refuge. It was where I went to think about things and nobody could bother me. I could pull the wall down, and no one could get to me there. I was very good at shutting out the world once I went into my stories. ‘

She famously began writing her first book, ‘Obernewtyn’, when she was a teenager. It is a powerful collision of nuclear anxiety and the nuclear effects of a parent’s death. In this book, and its resulting series, the writing of which has accompanied her throughout many life stages, Isobelle explores questions of human morality, environmental destruction and belonging. Her characters mirror her own identity, often feeling like outcasts with a strong sense of justice.

As a voracious reader, Isobelle can tear through multiple books a week. She takes particular inspiration from the multi-dimensional world building of authors like Ursula Le Guin and Tolkien. Due to this pace of consumption, she has a ridiculously over-developed vocabulary, which results in a deliciously rich and descriptive use of language. She is also likely the person in the room to whom one might turn to, for the definition of a word.When it comes to illustration, she notes Tove Janssen’s Moomintroll books, Edward Gorey’s quirky art and ‘The Mouse and His Child’ by Russell Hoban with its illustrations by Lilian Hoban, as formative favourites.

Isobelle gravitated towards the fantasy and sci-fi mediums as a way of thinking about the real world which she often found troubling.  ‘I took my thoughts and questions into my writing.’

‘To begin in undertaking a PhD, I was looking for a framework for my own lived knowledge and some kind of gravitas when I was on a panel with people who were labelled realist writers and academics, I wanted to slug back in their language to say what I wanted about what I do.’

In her PhD, Isobelle interrogates the capacity of fantasy as a lens through which to examine and process real emotions and events. ‘I love genre writing, but I don’t set out to write to a category. I use the tools that work for me. Sometimes the tools are those of the fantastic and sometimes they are realist tools.’

For Isobelle, each work begins with a question or raft of questions, and writing is a way of engaging these questions.

‘I think if you look at any writer’s body of work you can see that underneath they’ve got one or two questions they’re answering over and over again.’

Over the years Isobelle has essentially been in pursuit of understanding human morality, with a focus on finding the courage to engender and seek kindness in a confusing and dark landscape: ‘What is goodness? How can I be a good human being?’ This has lead to a substantial focus on activism later in life. She has been particularly outspoken about Australia’s offshore detention of asylum seekers. For a period she would go out, daily, to stand for an hour somewhere with a handmade sign protesting and informing about the government’s treatment of people seeking asylum. With this small and gentle action, Isobelle hoped to stir conversation and connection with passers by, perhaps especially, when they disagreed with her message. In recent years she has developed an interactive installation around this period, titled ‘What Would You Stand For?’. A moment from one of these installations is even featured on one of our other kites, created by Sara Phemister.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/audio/3464589787153335?igsh=M2RiZ3NhcnQ4NHJh

Becoming an illustrator was something that came later in Isobelle’s career with the creation of the ‘Little Fur’ Series.

It began long before that in the private arena as something she did for her daughter, in the form of little hand-bound booklets often following her daughter’s toys on their adventures. Isobelle regards her venture into illustration as a sweetly unprecedented gift, that has become a solid part of her portfolio, with an additional series titled ‘The Kingdom of The Lost’ under her belt.

Isobelle says that winning the CBC Book of the Year in the Younger Readers Category for the first book in her second illustrated series, Kingdom of the Lost, meant much to her because the award is given as much for the art as the writing. ‘That was the moment I felt I could truly think of myself as an illustrator as well as a writer.’

Over the past ten years Isobelle has become interested in graphic story telling. She has already collaborated on a graphic novel with artist Daniel Reed titled ‘Evermore’ and is presently working on a graphic novel called ‘Saltsong’, with Paul Summerfield. (Both men are artists and kitemakers in the ‘Hope Flies’ project!)

Above, Isobelle working on the storyboard for her graphic novel, up at a mountain retreat for graphic story writers/artists she arranged for her Patreon supporters.

Her own kite is a tribute to one of London’s urban foxes, spotted one very late on a night walk to a friend’s house in Muswell Hill. Foxes are a recurring image in her work, suggestive of what is wild and untamed, yet able to co exist with even a civilisation and species trying to eradicate it. Supremely adaptable and yet also vulnerable.

‘I had my 30 makers, but one of the original kite artists became very ill. I found another maker happy to do a kite, but it struck me that this might happen again and so I decided to make a placeholder kite, just in case. Then another kite maker dropped out very recently because a kite escaped before arriving at its’ makers address and he had no time to paint a replacement,’ Isobelle said. ‘Again I found another kite maker, however she can’t complete hers in a second, and the final two kite articles are yet to be composed, so even though mine is actually the 31st kite, here I am.’

‘I had never painted or drawn on canvas, so I used gesso to make it whiter and a bit smoother then I tried out a little stroke of pencil to see if I could rub it out. I could and that made it a lot better because when I illustrate I draw over and over the same thing until I get a shape that pleases me. It is not about perspective but about characterisation, whether of a character or a setting, which for me, is almost always another character whether drawn or written.’

To create her fox, Isobelle applied her favoured hatching technique over a combination of vivid orange water colour, pastels and drawing ink. The fox has wings, formed of interleaved feathers of sheer fabric in an earthy tone, and a lush fox’s brush she created forms the kite tail. She admits to finding the task of being a kite maker far more of a challenge than making the thirty (one) kites in the first place. (You can read about the kite making in another post on this site.)

‘It was hard to think of myself as an illustrator for some time, because I had no training, then it dawned on me that I am also an untrained writer. I learned to write by doing it, and it is the same with illustrating.

‘Of course the art community is incredibly generous with equipment, ideas, suggestions and encouragement.’

Below, drawing with Tony Flowers at Bologna Book Fair.

Below Anne Spudvilas sharing knowledge and art experience with a group of people on a Mountain Retreat with Isobelle.

‘I have been enriched creatively and personally by half of these incredible kite makers!’ Isobelle laughed. ‘It may be that the nicest thing about becoming an illustrator that I am now part of this generous, talented fellowship.’

Isobelle drew her fox over and over until she got it to fit nicely into the kite shape, then used fine-line felt tip pens to draw in the background. ‘Actually about thirty of them, because the canvas was so rough that it wore them out very quickly. It wore the lead out of the pencils too. I was sharpening every other minute.’

In her opinion, her fox turned out to be a wolf-ish kind of fox, but she decided it did not matter since she thinks of herself as a foxy kind of human. Her title is a tribute to that long ago urban fox, running along the middle of a street at night.

You can join Isobelle and others for monthly workshops, Mountain Retreats and find out what she is doing next, by signing up to her Patreon site.

https://www.patreon.com/c/user/about?u=18489457

by Adelaide Stolba