This series of work is inspired by an artefact called ‘witch in a bottle’, currently held in the Pitt Rivers Museum, which was found around 1912 in Sussex, England. I have had a long-lasting fascination with this object since I was a child, as I would stare into the shiny reflective bottle wondering what is actually inside? I have returned to it now in my life as I attempt to answer this question in my work. I have used toy ‘geo-magnets’ and balloons in order to try and fit a witch in a bottle and physically 're-create' this artefact as a form of research and understanding. Through this I created a logic whereby the bottle is the balloon and the magnets are the witch. I am examining boundaries, categories and what freedom in restriction can look like through a queer feminist lens. I am using painting as both a legitimation and ‘artefac-ting’ of queer experience.

Ishbel Angus is an artist currently based in London. She has just completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, supported by The President and Vice-Chancellor’s UK Cost of Living Scholarship. Ishbel graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2024 with a First Class BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking.
 
Ishbel juxtaposes the cryptic and hyperreal in their work as her paintings become vessels.
She centres queerness using painting to define undefined things and investigates tensions between the known and unknown. Ishbel examines categories by blending materiality using both painted and real objects as interventions in her work, creating ‘illusion-isms’ that challenge boundaries of surfaces. Painting becomes an act of archiving and legitimisation, offering form to the unfixed. Ishbel’s work reimagines objects not as passive symbols, but as active participants in queerness.
 
Currently, Ishbel is making work about an artefact called the ‘witch in a bottle’ found in 1912 and held in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.