Isabel Nolan Spaced Out
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin 25 November – 12 January
The title of Isabel Nolan’s latest exhibition might on the one hand point towards a set of objects alongside each other, given space for consideration after the process of making has occurred; on the other hand, given the range of works on show, it could pertain to a state of being. A stoned teenager, perhaps; an ecstatic saint; a clump of time; a memory perturbed and moulded by all the mundane and ordinary interferences of everyday life; or even a cosmic event, say a supernova. There is no information in the exhibition that might clarify matters one way or another. But even that seems like a performative gesture in and of itself. Writing is a material often utilised in Nolan’s practice, in the form of texts that, at times, appear as wall-based artworks. Not here though. There are the objects and there are their titles:
Pull (2020–21), Into the dark (2021) or Overgrown (2020–21), for example. In Et sic in infinitum (and so on…) (2021), one of the many oil-on-canvas works in the show, words appear and disappear: I can just about make out the words ‘with’ and ‘the’ written in paint as they slip away into a multitude of thorny modernist curls and painted licks.
The exhibition consists of 13 wall-based works, ranging from small oils to largescale, hand-tufted, 100 percent New Zealand-wool tapestries. When the sky above will not be named (2021), one of the two large tapestries in the exhibition, engulfs the viewer. An exploding sun that could be contracting or disintegrating leads one’s eyes into a rapturous cacophony of colour, reminiscent of the visual vocabularies and concentric circles of Sonia Delaunay’s and Robert Delaunay’s electric-light-inspired paintings of the early twentieth century. Miracle of Fire (2021), the other tapestry, recalls the architecture depicted in Sassetta’s Saint Francis before the Sultan (1493), which hangs in London’s National Gallery. Here a ball of fire burns inexplicably at the centre of a temple. The miracle of fire is, of course, no miracle: it is the physical working of the sun, and its unbounded form taunts the rigid structure of the religious building it is situated within. That disjunction feels germane to the show as a whole: Nolan’s recent works are insights, in material form, into the numinous condition of living in a world in a constant state of flux. Frank Wasser