House Music: Inside the world of Isha Bøhling

THAT HOUSE ON MARE ST film still 2023, Film , performance Sound and song work by Isha Bøhling

The entrance to Isha Bøhling and Ian Monroe's studio beneath the railway arches in London Fields is marked by a yellow metal chime — powder-coated aluminium, catching the light off the brick, producing a tone when the air moves through it that sits at the threshold between sculpture and instrument. In Isha's work, that threshold is where everything interesting happens.

The studio is a ten-minute walk from the Victorian terrace in Hackney where the two of them live. The house surprises you: from the outside it is east London as expected, but inside the walls have been painted the cool ice blue of a Danish interior — Bøhling is British-Danish, and the inheritance shows. The rooms are dotted with their own work, paintings and objects accumulated over decades of making, the domestic space functioning as a kind of ongoing exhibition that no curator has arranged and no gallery has sanctioned. It is, in the best sense, a home that thinks.

Artist Isha Bohling at the studio in Ses Dotze Naus, artist residency. Ibiza, Spain.

Bøhling has spent the better part of three decades working across painting, sound, object, film and performance — often simultaneously, often in ways that refuse to stay in their lanes. The Victorian terrace is for living and absorbing; the arches are for making and testing. The yellow chime at the studio entrance is the hinge between the two.

Her paintings are the work most immediately legible — graphic, geometric, built up in layers of acrylic and wax on wood, with titles like Metry, Estimating Magnitude, Lemon Creek, Purple Haze. They are not purely abstract, though they feel that way at first. Look longer and a kind of ordering principle emerges: a geometry that seems to be listening to something, reaching toward pattern the way a musician reaches toward a melody that hasn't quite resolved. Bøhling has written about this herself — she calls it listening to colour. The wax allows a translucency that makes the paintings feel lit from inside, as though the ice blue of the walls has seeped into the work itself.

The domestic and the exhibited have always been porous in her practice. In 2023, That House on Mare Street — a residency and group show held in a nearby property bought by friends to develop — brought film, sound and object together in lived-in rooms rather than a conventional gallery. It is the kind of gesture Bøhling returns to instinctively: the belief that work changes in a domestic space, that the morning light and the shifting air of a room where someone actually lives does something to a painting that white walls cannot.

More recently, METRY showed at postROOM gallery in Dulwich — again in a house, again with that sense of work finding its natural habitat in the personal rather than the institutional. The title comes from that recurring word in her paintings, a kind of shorthand for the geometric and musical logic that runs through everything she makes.

Bohling at the Pierre Octon art centre.

Ian Monroe — painter, collaborator, the other half of the Hackney studio life — has appeared in Bøhling's work formally as well as privately. Her sound sculpture Prime (2015), a welded yellow aluminium structure emitting a looped 13-minute composition performed by Bøhling herself, was made in direct collaboration with him for a site-specific project at Dilston Grove in south London. The yellow chime at the studio entrance carries that same logic: functional, beautiful, announcing something.

Bøhling completed her MA at Central Saint Martins and has exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery, the Kunstraum Baden in Switzerland, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where her painting Silence appeared in Beethoven Moves — a major exhibition marking the 250th anniversary of Beethoven, alongside work by Basquiat, Twombly, Goya and Turner. She represented England at the Gongju Biennial in South Korea, held a residency at the Getty Foundation in Siena, and received a Freelands Foundation Award in 2020.

But the work keeps coming back to Hackney, to the ice blue terrace, to the arches, to the particular quality of east London light. What Bøhling is excavating — her own word for the process — is resonance: the patterns in colour and light and sound that exist just at the edge of conscious perception. Her late grandmother, Ruth Lange, was a Danish athlete who boycotted the 1936 Berlin Olympics in protest at the Nazi regime. Bøhling made a sound work, Moonlight, using her grandmother's inherited magic lantern and a family collection of music boxes, as a kind of memorial. The personal and the historical fold into each other in her practice the way the wax folds into the paint — inseparably, translucently.

The chime sounds at the studio door. The trains pass overhead. The work continues.

Isha Bøhling's work can be found at ishabohling.com