They Call Me Witch
Artist & Works
Isabella Marie Galante


Isabella Marie Galante (born 2000 in the Philadelphia suburbs) is a London-based multidisciplinary artist with roots in sculpture and set design, crafting work that bridges the tactile and digital realms.
Through a Gothic feminist lens, she conjures natural shapes into mythic vessels, exploring where culture touches flesh and flesh rejects soul.  
Her aesthetic references span from the psychological intensity of Louise Bourgeois to the uncanny whimsy of Jim Henson.
Across her work, the viewer is left with a melancholic testament to overcompensation, performance, and the fragile longing of the human condition in a world that increasingly desires to transcend it.

website:https://bmgalante.myportfolio.com/
ins: @b.m.galante @bellemariefaith



Eldest Daughter (2025)
 
plastic, plaster bandages, primer, foundation, highlighter, nail varnish


"Eldest Daughter" personifies the human condition, specifically, a process which generalized feminine identities are assigned generationally. Experience of their bodies, the cultural politics of how to discipline them, and the pendulum banter of always "too little or too much". The title refers to something ancient and biblical, reminiscent of Aphrodite, Lilith, or Eve, a beginning of "womanhood", the eldest of "femininity". The eldest daughter, the first daughter known in time. However, there is also a modern-day understanding of what the Eldest Daughter is in a family; a physical form of "expectation".

The sculpture, representative of a conch shell, carries the essence of the natural world; it feels familiar, but the way it has been extremeized and distorted, it becomes something uncomfortably otherworldly. The materials utilized to express this all come from the ritualistic practice of female transformation itself. The plaster bandages, a post-operative healing and restriction. The makeup, painting your casted chosen identity over your given born body. Finally, the plastic bones of the sculpture and my collaborator on this piece -- digital identity. Mainstream media obsession, and the hunger to be ageless and timeless have a large hand in not only "the creature" of this sculpture, but the monster of reality.