Isabel Nolan

Isabel Nolan is an Irish contemporary artist who works with sculpture, textile, photographs, and text. Nolan lives and works in Dublin.

Nolan, according to a review of her work in Frieze Magazine, works similarly to Eva Berendes, Nicholas Byrne and Richard Wright, by using pre-modern pattern-making and craftsmanship to re-investigate the importance of making.^[1] Nolan frequently makes reference to the aesthetics of cosmology.^[2] The work is often the result of a slow and deliberate process, matching pattern with en elusive sense of order.^[3] Nolan's work often has its origins in literary works, such as Thomas Hardy's poem The Darkling Thrush that provided the title for The Weakened Eye of Day, a work she conceived for the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2014.^[4] As part of The Weakened Eye of Day, she wrote a piece of "speculative fiction" in the form of an online audio work called The Three Body Problem.^[5]

Her work has been shown in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Musée d’art moderne de Saint Etienne, France and Mercer Union. Nolan was one of a group of seven artists who represented Ireland in the 2005 Venice Biennale.^[6]

• Nolan, Isabel. Isabel Nolan : intimately unrelated = intimement sans rapport. Sligo Saint Etienne: The Model Musée d'Art Moderne, 2011. ISBN 978-0-9567179-1-7^[7]
• Nolan, Isabel. Some surfaces on which patterns occur. Onestar Press, 2013.^[8]
• Nolan, Isabel. Curling up with reality. Dublin: Launchpad and Kerlin Gallery, 2020. ISBN 978-0-9750070-9-3^[9][10]

• The three body problem (audio work)
• Kerlin Gallery artist page