Ireland

Isabel Nolan’s work is rich, compelling and visually arresting, encompassing enigmatic sculptures, colourful hand-tufted tapestries, radiant paintings, drawings and writing. Her practice is driven by a fascination with the “made-ness” of the human world – our inventions, beliefs and narratives – and by an acute awareness of their fragility, contingency and the capacity for transformation.

Moving fluidly between wonder and unease, she explores how humans orient themselves within a vast universe and unstable world, questioning and collapsing the hierarchies that shape experience and expectation. Her enquiries are both particular and wide-ranging, rooted in expansive fields such as cosmology, deep history, religion, literature and mythology. The breadth of her interests are mirrored in the materials and scales employed: from architectural steel sculptures that frame or obstruct our movement, to renditions of dust.

As Nolan has written, her work is haunted by the question of “how to love a tumultuous world, an indifferent universe and humans that are so often awful to each other.” Her works create a sense of material intimacy that draws the viewer into something far bigger than themselves, giving form to fundamental questions about how human activity renders both order and chaos meaningful, unnerving or beautiful.