Dr Isabelle Gapp

Biography

Isabelle is an Interdisciplinary Fellow in the Department of Art History and associated with the Environment and Biodiversity Challenge Area.

She is a specialist in landscape and environmental art history from around the Circumpolar North and from 1800 to the present day. Her current research looks at the intersections between art and glaciology in the study of historic and contemporary printmaking, photography, and drawing made by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists in the North American Arctic. 

Prior to joining Aberdeen, Isabelle was an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD from the University of York in 2019.

Isabelle is an Editor for the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) and the co-lead for the Jackman Humanities Institute working group Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North, a collaboration between Aberdeen and the University of Toronto. At Aberdeen, Isabelle is affiliated with the Cryosphere and Climate Change Research Group. 

To date, Isabelle is the author of one monograph (forthcoming in April 2024) and has published more than six single-author papers and numerous public humanities essays. She has also co-authored an additional seven papers with colleagues in the fields of art and architectural history, environmental history, geography and glaciology.

Research Overview

My research leads with the visual material. I write about small sketches and large-scale paintings, drawings and prints, canonical and lesser-known works, many displayed or archived in collections around the Circumpolar North. I consider the material, cultural and environmental entanglements of landscape painting and environmental visual cultures through a variety of media from 1850 to the present day.

Drawn largely towards coastlines, my research moves from watercolours to photography, oil paintings, prints, graphite, charcoal and ink drawings, driftwood, and sealskin and emphasises how these distinct material processes highlight different facets of terrestrial and marine environments. By working collaboratively with other disciplines, primarily geography and glaciology, this research expands upon these material and disciplinary boundaries and contributes an exchange of ideas and expertise across intellectual areas. Throughout my work, thinking ecocritically about art history means reshaping traditional narratives to offer historical interlocutors or laboratories that contend with environmental histories and current, global crises. 

Funding and Grants

2023            Arctic Connections Fund 2023-24, Scottish Government (£8159). For Teaching Arctic Environments with University of Washington and University of Manitoba.

2023            New Foundation for Art History Publication Grant (£3060)

2022            Kungliga Patriotiska Sällskapet (Royal Patriotic Society) Publication Grant, Sweden (£1650)

2022            Fridtjof Nansen’s Fond, Norway. Co-awarded for conference Nordic Nature: Art, Ecology, Landscape (£3700)

2022            Fritt Ord Foundation, Norway. Co-awarded for conference Nordic Nature: Art, Ecology, Landscape (£1500)

2022            Association for Art History Scholarly Research Grant (£500)

2021-24      Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group (£5400)

2021            Association for Art History Scholarly Research Grant (£600)