Isolatoes is a web project inspired by Herman Melville's Moby Dick. The title comes from Chapter 27, "They were nearly all islanders on the Pequod, isolatoes too..." Initiated in 2008, isolatoes includes visual studies of selected chapters from the novel. Each chapter is a collage mixed from a series of paintings and videos (these original paintings and videos are included here). The project at isolatoes.isabelmar.com includes sources and references as well as a menu mirroring the opening sections in Moby Dick: Introduction, Etymolgy, and Extracts.

My parents emigrated from the Azores Islands in 1953, the year I was born. In 1957 we went back to live on Pico island for nearly a year. During that year the Capelinhos volcano erupted on neighboring Faial. The materiality and precariousness of being from an island was described by Azorean poet Vitorino Nemésio in 1923: "For us, geography is the same as history. Like mermaids we have a double nature: we are made of flesh and stone. Our bones dive into the ocean." The Island project, begun in 2003, is concerned with this "geography and history."

In 2000 I moved to a new house and started a garden (after returning from a trip where I had seen Monet's late paintings). I didn't realize it until later but the activity of burying seeds, bulbs and rhizomes in the ground and anticipating the resulting shapes and colors was influencing my work in the studio. On a conscious level, these works were driven by the stories found in Camoes' Os Lusíadas, including the story of King Pedro I and Inês de Castro. I based the book, Cantigas, on Camoes' ten cantos about the voyages of Vasco da Gama.

The title, Infection in the Sentence, refers to chapter 2 in the The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination, by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. This was a work of literary theory published in 1979 and "praised for its bold reinterpretation of works by leading nineteenth-century women novelists." The installation, paintings, books and films here are related to various short stories discussed in Madwoman including The Yellow Wallpaper, The Blank Page, and A Jury of Her Peers.