"Petrification" Painting

Isaac Smeele is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, and installation. Their work emerges from a longing to reconnect with the inner child’s
profound sensitivity. They build textured, emotional worlds that hold grief, memory, and transformation. They are places where the wreckage of life becomes touchable, where joy and pain can coexist without
needing to be explained.
Raised in a northern Canadian town often cited as the country’s murder capital, they were surrounded by
violence, racism, and ecological collapse. In a culture where sensitivity was unsafe, Smeele took refuge in making things. Art became their language of survival, a place where they could speak without permission.
They were raised by their grandmother in a deeply fundamentalist Christian home where corporal punishment was used to instill fear. Spirituality became synonymous with control and shame. Throughout their adult life, they have been reclaiming meaning and the sacred through relationships with Indigenous healers, medicines, and story. These experiences have offered them a path toward connection, reciprocity, and presence.
At the age of 21, Smeele survived a violent home invasion that left lasting trauma. Their art practice became not only an outlet but a grounding mechanism when flashbacks and fear overtook their body. Their current work is created through somatic techniques, breath, and a physical relationship to material. Using beeswax, oil, clay, raw pigments, and found objects, they build thick surfaces that resemble decaying ecosystems or emotional terrains. These pieces are not puzzles to be solved. They are beings to be felt. Each work becomes a presence in the room, holding memory and asking to be met.
They believe repression is the enemy of healing. That we are meant to feel fully.
That mystery matters more than certainty. Their work invites the viewer to stay with what cannot be named.
After years of building space for others, including CUFO Arts, an artist residency outside Montreal focused on Indigenous and underrepresented artists, Smeele is now entering a phase of deeper personal creation. They are developing a body of large-scale sculptural paintings that extend into the room as installations. These works often draw on stories shared by Cree Elder Joseph Naytowhow, Smeele’s collaborator and co-writer on a stage play
exploring the forced domestication of Indigenous families and the rupture of traditional life.