Isabel Nolan
Everything I said let me explain
March 25 – May 7, 2005
Public Interview: Thursday, 5th May at 6.15pm
The artist in conversation with curator, Grant Watson
Admission free
Project Arts Centre
39 East Essex st, Temple Bar
Dublin 2
T +353 1 8819 613
www.project.ie
Isabel Nolan’s first major solo show opens in Project Arts Centre on 25th March. For the exhibition, Nolan, whose practice includes different media such as painting, drawing, sculpture, video and animation, has been commissioned to make a new body of work.
The exhibition at Project will feature a short animated film and a series of works on paper. The subject of the film is a friend that the artist has being drawing on and off since adolescence. This friend, waking from sleep, is confronted with the appearance of strange and unaccountable phenomenon.
In her work 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. She frequently uses scraps of words and images arranged in open-ended configurations to describe the loose and associative process by which sense is given to things.
Sometimes Nolan uses her own image as a starting point, as in the video ‘Sloganeering’ where she writes sentences onto her T-shirt which she then scribbles out and replaces with contradictory ones. At other times her attempt to describe something awesome and unimaginable is coupled with an inappropriate medium, producing comic results – for example 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, Isabel Nolan has participated in numerous group exhibitions including ‘How Things Turn Out’ at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2002), the Yugoslav Biennial of Young Artists’, Belgrade (2004), the ‘Budget Bureau for Language Applications’ at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Geneva (2005), and ‘Coalesce’ at both the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo and K3, Zurich (2005). Nolan is one of seven Irish artists representing Ireland at the 51st Venice Biennale in June 2005.
Project is Ireland’s foremost interdisciplinary centre for visual and performing arts. The focus of the visual arts programme is to commission and produce new work by Irish and international artists and to create a discursive environment for the reception of contemporary practice.
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For further press information, please contact Doireann Gillan at publicity[at]project.ie. Images are available on the press information section of www.project.ie
