{"id":474631,"date":"2026-05-08T10:50:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T10:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/474631\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T10:50:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T10:50:15","slug":"thinking-small-and-dreaming-big-in-isabel-nolans-imaginary-world-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/474631\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking small and dreaming big in Isabel Nolan\u2019s imaginary world – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Dublin-born artist Isabel Nolan is known for her work exploring meaning and\u00a0uncertainty, taking cosmology, religion\u00a0and humanism as starting points. She draws on the visual language of the late\u00a0Medieval and early Renaissance periods,\u00a0building pieces that are richly textured and often lush. Her Ireland pavilion, Dreamshook, developed with the curator Georgina Jackson, builds on those themes. The exhibition explores the fuzzy, in-between state we experience after waking\u00a0up, when dreams seem to merge with the real world, and ties it to a fictional version of the life of Aldo Manuzio\u2014a Renaissance humanist famous for publishing Greek classics as enchiridia, or portable books, in Venice.<\/p>\n

You often use small, intimate forms like\u00a0textiles to approach big ideas. Why\u00a0is that scale important to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s because a lot of the time my way of accessing those ideas is probably through popular literature or introductions to things. And so my attention, then, is grabbed by something smaller or anecdotal. It\u2019s important for me that it\u2019s something quite bodily at times. It gives a physical and a mental relationship to these ideas. So, it might be wandering around a museum and being kind of struck by a single object, and it just stays with me.<\/p>\n

Do you think it is a search for meaning?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I mean, the thing that interests me most about humans is that for however many hundreds of thousands of years we\u2019ve evolved into our current condition, we have\u00a0found all of these different ways to negotiate the world. Of all the awful things\u00a0that we do as a species, I find that capacity that we have for curiosity and for finding a way to describe something to ourselves fascinating.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Nolan\u2019s Deep Time Day (2024); the artist is inspired by Italian art from the 1300s and 1400s<\/p>\n

Photo by Lee Welch, courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery<\/p>\n

You seem drawn to the late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Why is that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is a period, particularly Italian artwork from the 1300s and 1400s, that I\u2019ve always really loved. I started thinking about the idea of the secular and about humanism. It felt like some really crucial events or moments or ideas emerged in that period. You really see the genesis of a new way of living, ideas taking root that have really gone on to shape the world that we know. You could go to the 700s or the 800s and really feel like an alien, but I think you\u2019d probably be able to negotiate Europe at the time of the 1400s. You\u2019d have a shared vocabulary.<\/p>\n

What does the title of the pavilion, Dreamshook, mean?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a word that I coined, talking about that feeling of waking from an incredibly powerful dream and being kind of haunted by all of the strange events that maybe took place. It\u2019s such a universal experience. So, I started imagining this story about Aldo Manuzio and thinking about creating an exhibition\u2014an entirely fictive presentation of him and his dream to populate the world with relatively accessible, portable books. That\u2019s a dream I can get behind.<\/p>\n

There was so much hope in this idea that humans might have an inherent moral possibility outside of using God as a framework to explain everything. It\u2019s a moment like now, where expertise is being denigrated by public figures.<\/p>\n

Would you say you\u2019re also a little uneasy\u00a0about the cultural inheritance<\/strong>
of that time?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah. There\u2019s been so many artists and thinkers and philosophers who have done much work over the last few decades: rescuing stories that were lost or voices that were occluded, and building up a much bigger, fuller and more inclusive picture of both history and perspectives on the contemporary moment.<\/p>\n

I think one of the things that I\u2019ve always been interested in is having this really kind of ambivalent relationship to the kind of European culture that I grew up with\u2014in terms of what I was able to see in books. My brain was shaped, probably, by reading a lot of literature by dead white men. It\u2019s like trying to reconcile the fact that I still think that there\u2019s a lot of amazing writing and beautiful ideas and interesting stories within\u00a0that.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Arsenale<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Dublin-born artist Isabel Nolan is known for her work exploring meaning and\u00a0uncertainty, taking cosmology, religion\u00a0and humanism as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[267],"tags":[365,362,363,364,110909,366,18,117,19,17,208030,12888,95735],"class_list":["post-474631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-craft","tag-design","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-isabel-nolan","tag-textiles","tag-venice-biennale-2026"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116538574488680738","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}