Isys Hennigar

Isys Hennigar is an artist working in ceramics and metal. Her work invokes real and reimagined ecological encounters that underscore transformation, hybridity, and play as tools of renewal. Braiding forms and imagery from agriculture, mythology, and medicine, her work considers systems of sustenance and healing and the cultural and ecological legacies of land cultivation. Grounded in the landscape of the southeastern United States— a site of fantasy, precarity, and symbolic abundance—the work presents chimeric objects in which allegories of sustenance, danger, and purification merge.

Hennigar’s sculptural vessels are hand-built and adorned with relief carvings and cast details of vernacular objects such as deer hooves, peach pits, puzzle pieces, electric fencing insulators, tools, and toys. Animals are often rendered in ambiguous states of metamorphosis, hunt, or performance. The work’s layered surfaces are built through multiple firings and often incorporate metal components. In two-dimensional works, the carved porcelain imagery is mounted on metal. Employing jeweler’s techniques on a large scale, these works resemble engraved charms. Referencing objects of protection and historical depictions of infernal and sublime landscapes, they imagine possibilities of connection between wild and domestic realms, between chaos and play, and hybridity as an emblem of resiliency.

Isys received her MFA from the University of Georgia and BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the 2024 recipient of the South Arts North Carolina State Fellowship, and recent exhibitions of her work include the American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, CA), Sow & Tailor Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Signature Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), Ferrara Showman Gallery (New Orleans, LA), and the North Carolina Museum of Art. She is currently in residence at Anchorlight in Raleigh, NC as the 2025 Brightwork Fellow.

Visit Isys Hennigar’s website and Instagram page.