LUX is pleased to present the first London solo exhibition by Glasgow-based artist Isabel Barfod, in collaboration with LUX Scotland. The exhibition centres on her new Margaret Tait Commission film, ‘​How Much Air Lungs Can Hold’.

In this profound meditation on Black aquatic experiences, Barfod weaves experimental animation with intimate conversations with Black swimmers from Glasgow and London. The film’s sonic architecture creates eleven narrative threads that flow between personal revelation and collective memory, enmeshed with the hypnotic sound design by Shamica Ruddock.

Through these gathered voices, Barfod examines water as both a space of transcendence and a contested space, where moments of aquatic freedom emerge through community support yet often remain precluded by colonial legacies and systemic exclusion in the UK. Her abstract imagery emerges through a synthesis of CGI, traditional 2D animation, and underwater footage, acting as both witness and interpreter of the spoken words.

The exhibition opens a space where interiority, rememory, non-linearity, entanglement, and submergence converge, dissolving boundaries between embodied experience and collective memory. Through this immersive experience, Barfod surfaces speculative arrangements for Black social life, alongside dialectics of light:dark, presence:absence, legibility:opacity, and surface:depth. The work imagines the possibilities of embodiment, asking questions about our capacity to hold, listen, sense, and what it means to bear witness.

The exhibition’s screening schedule and a related event will be announced soon.

Artist biography:

Isabel Barfod is an animator and artist based in Glasgow. Working across digital, hand-drawn, 2D and 3D animation, her work is driven by irritation and speculation, looking to process agitations through drawing, scratching and mark making.

Her practice seeks to draw out the ‘hard-to-describe’ micro/experiences, feelings and phenomena associated with moving in and out of private/public space as a Black Queer person. Cloaking figures and gestures in abstraction, she evokes absurd, surreal and racialised social realities residing within the ephemeral encounter. As a means of working through her own uncertainty and frustrations, she images reparative and restitutive possibilities that are collectively-imagined and speculated.

Previous screenings, grants and commissions include: Margaret Tait Commission (2023/24), Edinburgh Film Festival (2023), In Motion Festival London & Rotterdam (2023), Flamin’ Animations Commission with Film London (2022/23), London International Animation Festival, Barbican, London (2022), Tramway TV (2022), Africa in Motion Film Festival (2019).