Following a degree in Art History and English at the University of York, Ibby trained as an easel paintings’ conservator at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Since graduating in 2004 she has worked as both an artist and a researcher into paintings and collections. She is currently undertaking an MA in Arts and Ecology at Dartington Arts School, University of Plymouth.

 In her practice Ibby uses drawing as an intimate means of understanding the land and life around her. Through an intensity of observation, the transcribing of other lives into the pictorial becomes a visceral act of recognition and remembrance. Often reflecting on themes of species loss, interdependence, and the tangled stories of the human and more-than-human, she explores the concept of making as a quiet act of resistance within the violent unmaking of life in the Anthropocene.

Applying her knowledge of historic painting techniques, Ibby creates tools and pigments foraged from the natural world, and meaning is echoed deeply in the materials used: the work becomes collaborative, peculiar to place and particular to being. Here she considers the notion of shared earth, and invites us to contemplate the stories of the many earth-others with whom we have co-evolved, and on whom we are dependent for continued existence. Striving to return agency to the more-than-human, in these works Ibby seeks to convey an equality of individual lived experience between species, always looking to a future of kinship.

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