FEATURE 002: Isabella Fuller's Still Timelapses

I love the freedom to move between mediums. Music is like spoken poetry and photography is like visual poetry. I never get bored and am always inspired.

Practitioner: Isabella Fuller

Location: Pōneke

Discipline: Photography / Music / Poetry

Isabella found Patronage through the ever-omniscient Instagram algorithm. When Blue Bottles (2024) and Lily (2025) appeared on the dashboard, I was taken aback. Dense, luminous photo collages. Florals layered over portraits, multiple exposures folded into one another until the image feels geological. I wanted to know more.

Laluna only deepened that feeling. Her dream-pop duo with Conrad produces music that speaks directly to my sixteen-year-old self, that version of me staring out of a rain-streaked car window, watching droplets race each other down the glass. If I hadn't built Patronage, we would never have crossed paths.

Isabella's practice resists separation. Her photo collages use the same logic as Laluna's compositions: repetitive, but additive. In the collages, portraits sit beneath florals beneath light leaks, each layer half-visible, demanding the viewer slow down and excavate. In the music, smooth synths and Isabella's drawn-out vocals accumulate gradually, hypnotically, building atmosphere the way fog builds over a harbour. The technique is different in each medium. The methodology is identical.

That layering produces something close to a gesamtkunstwerk - a total work of art, where image, sound, and word all speak in the same register. Her digital photo collages would not look out of place as Laluna cover art. Laluna's tracks would not feel foreign scored over her imagery. The connective tissue is a quality I keep returning to in my notes: fairytale moonlight. A softness that is not weakness. A gentleness that is not absence.

What makes the work land universally is its relationship to time. Isabella's collages are still timelapses. No singular moment, but successive moments compressed into a single frame. They carry a seasonal, liminal quality, the feeling of summer tipping into autumn, of adolescence tipping into something else. The spectator projects their own memories onto the work because the emotion it evokes is so unspecific and so precise simultaneously. That holiday with friends. That bonfire at the beach. The long drive home.

Laluna's Dreamcatcher EP, released last year, occupies this exact territory. The songs grew from late-night writing sessions between classes, and that intimacy is audible. Isabella's vocals float high and drawn-out, interacting with the composition the way wind chimes interact with one another - not by matching, but by moving in response to one another. The production is warm, unhurried, and quietly luminous. It would not be out of place in the earbuds of a teenager on the train home from school, or in the montage of a coming-of-age film nobody has made yet.

Isabella does all of this as a full-time student at Te Herenga Waka with two jobs. She does not study art. There is no institutional pressure shaping her output, no crit schedule, no assessment rubric. She creates for pure joy, and that freedom is both her engine and her point. When asked what is quietly holding the Wellington scene back, her answer is immediate: a lack of accessible space for young artists who are not art students to share their work.

It's an observation that carries weight precisely because she lives it.

Selected Works:

Revival (2025). Cover for the Free Body Problem poetry zine. Digital Photo Collage

Untitled (2025). Luminescence EP cover. Digital Photo Collage