Visual Arts
Isabel Nolan
Isabel Nolan’s work looks at how aesthetic sensibilities and diverse ways of knowing inform worldviews. She makes objects that undertake to communicate a fundamental contingency to existence, artworks that intimate that the search for meaning and beauty is both necessary and absurd. The work is underpinned by a desire to examine and embed in material form, challenging, seductive or intense moments and meetings with both ideas and phenomena. For Nolan this exploration happens through making things in a wide range of media, whether monumental or intimate in scale, they are tentative and precarious markers of the experience of our place beneath the sun. Recent solo exhibitions/projects include Launch Pad, New York (2015); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014); Musée d’art moderne de Saint Etienne, France (2012); The Model, Sligo, Ireland (2011); Artspace, New Zealand (2008); Gallery 2, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2008) and Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2005). In 2005, Isabel Nolan represented Ireland at the 51st Venice Biennale as part of a group exhibition, Ireland at Venice 2005.
Isabel Nolan was elected to Aosdána in 2018.