Isabella Maroon is the founder of IM Studio and is widely recognized for her impressionistic, anthropomorphic ceramic sculptures. Her work moves with an internal rhythm—shaped by the poetics of motion and a sensitivity to transformation—hovering at the edge where bodily gesture dissolves into ecological form. Through clay, Maroon explores the quiet intelligence of movement, allowing surfaces to swell, fold, and breathe as if caught mid-gesture, suspended between the human and the elemental.

Maroon received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018, where her early sculptural practice began to engage questions of form, material agency, and embodied experience. During this period, she expanded her artistic language internationally as a Chinese Scholarship Council scholar at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Immersed in a new cultural and material context, her work grew increasingly attuned to rhythm, balance, and the expressive potential of restraint.

Following her return to the United States, Maroon refined both her conceptual and material approach while working as an assistant to designer Steven Haullenbeek, an experience that sharpened her sensitivity to precision, function, and the dialogue between art and design. In 2020, she earned her Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where her practice shifted from expansive sculptural experimentation toward a more distilled and intentional design language.

Maroon’s work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including The New Guard: Stories from the New World at Carpenter Workshop Gallery, and has been featured in publications such as Design Miami, Wallpaper, Galerie Magazine, The Design Edit, and Dezeen.

Isabella Maroon places color at the center of her practice, viewing it as a primary vehicle for accessing emotional states that often defy verbal expression. Through nuanced shifts in hue, shade, and tint, her work seeks to communicate feeling directly, allowing color to operate as an emotional language in it’s own right. Maroon is particularly interested in the subjective experience of environment—how light, atmosphere, and surroundings shape our mindstate and influence the way we perceive and imagine the world around us.

Her exploration of human relationships—both to one another and to the environments they inhabit—frequently manifests through anthropomorphic forms. This body of work focuses on distilling the human essence of specific emotions, especially those that subtly alter posture, gesture, and physical disposition. Maroon’s work investigates the connection between humans and environments, and between environments and memory, drawing from both personal experience and collective recollection. In this way, she approaches art as a means of processing the past, using form and color to trace how memory, emotion, and place become embedded within the body.