From Bavaria to Byron, from blacksmithing to air sculpting, Isabell Heiss continues to expand her canvas.
Words Anneli Knight
Photography Isabell Heiss
GROWING up in Europe defined Isabell Heiss’s early ideas of what it means to be an artist. “I identified as a painter,” says Heiss, who was born and spent her childhood in the Bavarian Alps of Germany. “Painting was considered the highest art form, so becoming a painter was something to strive for from a young age.”
She grew up in a home where her blacksmith father worked from a forge in the basement, and she experimented with welding metals with him from an early age, though she never considered this part of her artistic practice. “Unless you question it, you have a preconceived concept around what art is and what it isn’t.”
In 2011, Heiss moved from Germany to New South Wales’s Northern Rivers, where she has lived for more than a decade. “These places that get under my skin are where the sky meets the earth,” she says. “These beautiful places, where nature is bigger than you.”
