Isla and the Quiet Truth Behind the Noise

The Harbour Standard — Arts & Culture

“Drop From the Fourth”: Isla and the Quiet Truth Behind the Noise

by Julia Renn, Senior Culture Correspondent

Before meeting her, I knew Isla the way most Australians do. As the impossible metal vocalist whose voice filled stadiums, broke charts, and spawned think pieces about “female rage in the 21st century.”

But walking into Drop From the Fourth, her first visual art exhibition, I realised something quickly. I knew almost nothing about her.

The work on the walls was intelligent, deliberate, technically vicious. No chaos. No cliché. No wildness except the kind you get from someone who survived long enough to sculpt their own story.

So when Isla approached quietly, composed, dark eyed and dry mouthed, I realised my art world assumptions were showing.

And worse. She noticed.

An awkward beginning

She found me staring too long at a large triptych of blurred faces pressed against a smeared surface, human forms distorted through thick oil and palette-knife abrasions.

I said something academic about “performative alienation.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Or maybe it’s just three people who didn’t like the artist.”

There it was. The tension. Not hostile. Not combative. Just Isla’s way of saying. Don’t intellectualise me before you’ve met me.

She gestured to the painting.

“It’s called Burning Bridges. People think it’s about anger. It’s about leaving too late.”

For a moment, I understood precisely how far off the mark my assumptions had been.

A rocker who refuses the rocker script

The deeper we moved into the gallery, the more contradictory Isla became.

Her reputation suggests volatility. The woman in front of me was restrained. Her humour wasn’t loud. it was surgical.

She noticed me scanning her work for familiar narrative patterns.

“You’re looking for trauma in the shape of a guitar solo.”

I started to apologise. She shook her head.

“It’s fine. I know the brand they stuck me with. But I’m not drunk, I’m not self destructive. Not today. And I’m not a walking cautionary tale. I’m just a person with a lot of feelings I refuse to pretend are nice.”

That was the first moment I felt the shift. She wasn’t dangerous. She was honest.

And honesty is unsettling in a way chaos never is.

AI, slop, and the unexpected depth behind her philosophy

We reached a smaller room where a painting showed Isla’s face worn down by abrasions, oil dragged until ten expressions lived in one surface.

I like to ask a certain question to all artists. What do they think of AI.  The hate if fairly consistent.

Isla was direct.

“Everyone expects me to hate AI.”

It was not what I expected her to say.

She folded her arms, thinking aloud, not performing.

"Look… AI isn’t neutral. It mirrors you back.That’s the part people don’t get.”

"And those companies aren't the artists. Companies do what They've always done. They take market share first and settle lawsuits later".

She continued

"Clearly artists need to be paid and not just scrapped. That's obvious. But I also want to see individuals tell their stories. If it's their frame or their lens then it's art to me."

She stepped closer to the painting.

“But slop? You know, those messy, misaligned outputs everyone mocks?”

A subtle smile.

“Slop is compost.”

She didn’t mean it dismissively.

“Compost grows things. Slop means someone tried something. Even AI slop means someone chose it, curated it, felt something from it and artist want to control it.

Then, more pointedly:

“People call my early music trauma spew. Too ugly. Too raw. Not polished.”

She shrugged.

“Maybe it wasn’t for them. But if they came back, even once, something in them recognised it. Art isn’t meant to soothe. It’s meant to relay what the world refuses to acknowledge.”

I told her that sounded harsher than most artists allow themselves to admit.

She replied softly:

“If you witness something terrible and then go back to work the next day and everyone pretends the world didn’t just split open inside you? That silence is the trauma. I make things for the people who live in that silence.”

And with that, the tension between us dissolved, not because she convinced me, but because she revealed the version of herself that fame obscured.

That sculpture.

The emotional centre of the exhibition is a resin piece. A woman suspended, drowning, hair drifting, eyes closed in a breath that will never finish.

I approached it cautiously. Isla kept her eyes on me.

I asked who the woman was.

She was direct.

“My mother.”

Then a slight.

“She was an anesthetist. Jailed for malpractice.”

I admit, with some embarrassment, that I briefly took her words literally. Then her smile told me I'd get it soon. The women was underwater. Silent. Drowning. It was disturbing and I didn't quite know what to say. It was telling me things about her past. But not in words.

Survival

Toward the far wall hung a photograph of Isla next to a screaming face.

The exhibition’s title finally made sense.

“It almost happened,” she said.“Then it didn’t. And now it’s a drawing. Next to me.”

She didn’t dramatise it. She didn’t perform vulnerability. She simply acknowledged a past decision like one acknowledges an intersection they once nearly missed.

And this, more than the scream portraits, the distorted faces, the drowning resin, was the moment the entire show clicked into place.

Isla is someone who survived long enough to tell us something.

Leaving the gallery

At the exit, I asked her one last question, The obvious one.

“What do you want people to take from this?”

She gave a tired half smile.

“Make something. Even if it’s wrong. Even if it’s too much. Even if it’s slop.”

A pause.

“Especially if it’s slop. That’s your reflection.”

Then she walked away. Quiet as she arrived.