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Exhibition Text
The word Dreamshook describes the feeling of waking from a dream, when reality is destabilised and realms of possibility linger and dissipate. In the Irish Pavilion, Nolan’s exhibition of hand-tufted tapestry, drawing, and sculpture, represents thresholds, dream states, and narratives that strain the distinctions between the immaterial and the actual. The work develops from her sustained fascination with the human desire to find meaning or order in the universe, and the frameworks that shape our understanding of the world.
Nolan looks to the Middle Ages and early Renaissance as an era that resonates with now. It was a turbulent period marked by religious and political upheaval, a time transformed by plague, wars, and famine. Cultural and technological developments in Europe cultivated profound ideological change, challenged the nature of authority, and reshaped what it might mean to be human. The work draws on artefacts and ideas from those formative times that helped pattern the present-day: from the emergence of humanism and dramatic developments in Italian painting and architecture, to the invention of the printing press and the use of moveable type in Europe...
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Nolan looks to the Middle Ages and early Renaissance as an era that resonates with now. It was a turbulent period marked by religious and political upheaval, a time transformed by plague, wars, and famine. Cultural and technological developments in Europe cultivated profound ideological change, challenged the nature of authority, and reshaped what it might mean to be human. The work draws on artefacts and ideas from those formative times that helped pattern the present-day: from the emergence of humanism and dramatic developments in Italian painting and architecture, to the invention of the printing press and the use of moveable type in Europe...
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“Hypnagogia, specifically the horizontal moments, minutes perhaps, between being awake and asleep (and the corresponding hypnopompic state) is a fertile time for bewitching and strange thoughts. Our grasp on what is real and what is invention is softly deranged, nebulous, and the mind drifts out to meet the world without much purpose. Occasionally beautiful perceptions fire into life, problems are resolved, insights harvested, but equally it is a time when paranoid or insecure hunches take hold and cast their malevolent spell over a morning, or a lifetime. Anything can be imagined when we are not quite subject to the glare, the freight, of day.”
Isabel Nolan, Curling Up With Reality, 78.
Imagine feeling optimistic, a short essay by Isabel Nolan
dreams are confusing and not all come true.
There are two gates of dreams: one pair is made
of horn and one of ivory. The dreams
from ivory are full of trickery;
their stories turn out false. The ones that come
through polished horn come true.”
Homer’s The Odyssey, ca. 8th century BCE.1
These words are spoken by Penelope (Queen of Ithaca and wife of Odysseus) to a guest-stranger after she recounts a disturbing dream in which a lone eagle slaughters her flock of twenty geese. In her dream Penelope wept and wailed for the murdered fowl. This vision, which the stranger (the-disguised-as-a-beggar-Odysseus) encourages her to trust, foretells the return of her husband and the violent dispatch at his hands of the gaggle of greedy, increasingly boisterous suitors....
Artist Biography
Artist Isabel Nolan’s exhibitions are rooted in big subjects: cosmology and deep history; religion and mythology; mortality and love. Working across sculpture, textiles, paintings, drawings, photography and writing, Nolan responds to the fundamental question of how humans bring the world into meaning. Looking at the history of aesthetics, theology, technology, and ideas, Nolan examines how we frame and make our lived experience. Whether inspired by the knees of a 17th century sculpture, the status of a Neolithic artefact, or a solar storm in the 19th century, she looks for ways to like, or even love, the difficult and complex human world we’ve made. Born in Dublin, Nolan studied at the National College of Art & Design, and has had significant solo exhibitions in Ireland and internationally in spaces including: Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France; London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE, London; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Mercer Union, Toronto and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and Musée d’art moderne de Saint Etienne. Her work has been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Artspace, Sydney; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; Daejeon Museum of Art, South Korea; and Beijing Art Museum of the Imperial City, Beijing. She has participated in biennales including Lofoten International Arts Festival, Glasgow International, EVA International, Limerick, and in 2025 she was a commissioned artist for the 13th Liverpool Biennial, curated by Marie-Anne McQuay. In 2026 Nolan will have a comprehensive solo exhibition at Southwark Park Galleries, London, travelling to Bluecoat, Liverpool, in 2027. She lives in Dublin, and works in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Isabel is represented by the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York.