About


Isabella Hone-Saunders (they/she) is as a curator, arts worker and artist, born on Kaurna Country, now living in Naarm (melbourne).

Their curatorial practice is concerned with accessibility, representation and shared social responsibility while examining with criticality, the inclusivity of public art spaces. They aim to interrogate and implement methodologies towards an ethical, activist and queer-informed curation. The exhibitions, projects and public outcomes that Isabella curates present multi-phonic positions and de-centralise any notion of an authoritative curatorial power position in favour of platforming and supporting and nurturing the artist’s perspective.

Hone-Saunders’ artistic practice most often utilises movement, with the use of video as their preferred medium, often centering their body, or the body/ subject, as a focal figure. Their practice explores ideas of body idealisation, physicality, residual body language, identity, ritual and embodied readings and representations of social constructs.

Recently, their focus and research has centred upon the malleability, transgressiveness and potential of ritual to suit and serve queer people’s relationships to spirituality. Currently, they are researching and centring ‘hope’ as a generative and radical, curatorial and artistic device, and embodied discipline, to imagine our collective futures.

belibomb@hotmail.com
As curator and artist Isabella has worked with galleries and artist-run initiatives such as BLINDSIDE, Firstdraft, Cool Change Contemporary, FELTspace, KINGS-Ari, Blak Dot Gallery, Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West, Melbourne Art Library, project8 Gallery, Watch This Space, Sister Gallery, Footscray Community Arts, Vitalstatistix, Seventh, Trocadero, West Space, Cathedral Cabinet, Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West, Incinerator Gallery and as a TCB board member.

Isabella works as Assistant Curator, Art Museums, University of Melbourne. Formerly working as Director of Seventh Gallery, in the Curatorial team at ACMI and as Assistant Curator at ACCA. Previously they worked at Testing Grounds as Program Manager, as Engagement Coordinator at Channels Festival International Video Art Biennial, as well as in positions at Maningrida Arts and Culture, Kaldor Public Arts Projects, Next Wave and Flinders University Art Museum. They have interned for West Space and worked on projects with Liquid Architecture and Warlukurlangu Arts.

In 2017 IHS completed a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Melbourne. In 2016 they completed a Graduate Diploma in Art History at The University of Adelaide.

From 2013-2015 they completed a Bachelor of Arts, with a Major in History and a double Minor in Art and Visual Culture and English from the University of Adelaide.