Isabelle Young | Venice As I Was

Canopy Collections is delighted to present Venice As I Was, a solo exhibition of photographic works by Isabelle Young and the artist's first show at Canopy Collections HQ.

In Lord Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), his disillusioned flaneur reflects on Venice in a tone that oscillates between romance and ruin, writing of a city whose beauty is inseparable from its slow dissolution: “I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; / A palace and a prison on each hand.” The line contains a tension that resonates strongly within Isabelle Young’s photographic series Venice As I Was. Her images exist within this same unstable space - between splendour and erosion, memory and disappearance, violence and serene surrender. Venice appears not as a spectacle but as a fragile albeit sinister surface of signs, fragments quietly registering the weight of ecological and emotional time.

Young’s photographs rarely present the monumental Venice of postcards. Instead, they are populated with terrazzo floors bathed in liquid light, weathered porticos, shards of light piercing a monumental door, over-grown salt-swept garden walls, the subdued quiet of Campo Santa Maria Formosa in winter, or the faint residue of water across stone. These scenes echo the seasonal violence of the aqua alta, the tidal flooding that increasingly marks the rhythms of the lagoon. Water stains creep across architectural surfaces like slow handwriting, tracing the environmental precarity of a city defended by barriers yet perpetually threatened by the sea and over-tourism. The recently erected flood defences appear in the series as ambiguous presences - structures of protection that simultaneously acknowledge inevitable loss. Venice is both shielded and already defeated.

Young’s approach to image-making recalls the quiet revolution of Luigi Ghirri, whose photographic oeuvre transformed the extraordinary landscapes of Italy into something understated and quotidian. For Ghirri, the Italian environment was not a grand tableau but a collection of overlooked surfaces and everyday symbols through which the mythology of place gently dissipated. Young’s Venice functions similarly. Rather than dramatising catastrophe, she observes it in the banal poetry of detail: floodgates resting against stone, inept barriers protecting a frieze, damp plaster, a Sunday morning at Rialto emptied of spectacle. The images do not declare crisis instead they allow it to seep slowly into the frame.

Seen through the lens of Umberto Eco’s semiotics, these photographs operate as a system of subtle signs. Venice itself is already an image saturated with historical meaning, endlessly reproduced and consumed. Young’s work interrupts that visual shorthand. Each photograph destabilises the viewer’s expectation of Venice as a theatrical set, replacing spectacle with fragments whose meanings remain suspended. A flooded threshold, a garden dusted with salt, or the faint green stain left by retreating water becomes a signifier without a fixed narrative. The viewer reads these images as one reads a text whose grammar is incomplete. Venice here is less a location than a language in the process of eroding.

The title Venice As I Was carries a quiet autobiographical resonance. It suggests not only the memory of a place, but the memory of a self once situated within it. Beneath the ecological and cultural reflections lies a more intimate narrative: the artist’s own personal relationship with the city, shaped by a traumatic ending as turbulent as the lagoon’s tides. Memory leaks through the photographs much like the water they document. The fragments - terraces, empty campos, faintly decaying frescoes - carry the residue of lived experience. They are not simply landscapes but emotional coordinates, places where private history intersects with collective vulnerability.

In this sense, Young’s Venice is both elegy and diary. The city appears suspended at the threshold of submergence, its surfaces holding traces of what has already passed while also prefiguring its fated future. Byron sensed something similar two centuries earlier: a dark beauty inseparable from decline. Young extends that meditation into the present moment, where rising seas and personal memory converge.

Her photographs do not mourn loudly. Instead, they linger in a melancholic stillness where water, stone, and recollection blur together. Venice emerges as a city written in fragments - an archive of signs calmly awaiting the tide.

— Text by Alona Pardo, Director of the Arts Council Collection 

Isabelle Young | Venice As I Was 
12 May—3 July 2026
Private View: Tuesday 12 May, 6—8pm 
Canopy Collections HQ 
3 Bloomsbury Place
London WC1A 2QA 

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