 Isabel Nolan Isabel Nolan's first major solo show opens in Project Arts Centre. Nolan, whose practice uses different media such as painting, drawing, sculpture, video and animation, has been commissioned to make a new body of work which will include a short animated film. This film will be accompanied by a series of works on paper. The exhibition at Project will attempt to distil the different elements of the artist's practice into a singular statement. The subject of Nolan's short film is a friend of the artist, who waking from sleep, is confronted with the appearance of strange and unaccountable phenomenon. In her practice the artist seeks to address the problem of representation and the difficulty of attaching meaning to experience. Nolan's tendency to shift between different media highlights the inadequacy of the tools to hand and, in a more general sense, of art itself. Nolan frequently uses fragments and scraps of words and images. By arranging these in open-ended configurations she describes the loose and associative process by which sense and meaning are constructed. An example of this would be a selection of small-scale drawings and paintings on paper, depicting seemingly random elements, grouped together in an area of colour painted directly onto the wall. Sometimes Nolan uses her own image as a starting point, as in the video piece "Sloganeering 1-4" where, in a declamatory action she writes sentences onto her T-shirt which are then scribbled out or undermined by contradictory ones. At moments in her work the attempt to describe something awesome and unimaginable is coupled with a medium so inappropriate that it produces comic results. For instance, she once knitted the text of a poem that reflected on the inevitability of death into a brightly coloured blanket. Born and based in Dublin, Nolan has participated in numerous group exhibitions including "How Things Turn Out" at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2002), "The Holiday Show" at the Royal Hibernian Academy (2002), and "Utilisation Transitoire" by the Budget Bureau at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Geneva (2005). Nolan is one of seven Irish artists who will represent Ireland at the prestigious 51st Venice Biennale in June 2005. Exhibition: 24 March - 7 May 2005 Project Arts Centre 39 East Essex Street IE-Dublin 2, Ireland Telefon +353 1 881 9613/14 Email info@project.ie www.project.ie |
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