ISABEL NOLAN

The exhibition at Project attempted to distil the different elements of Nolan’s practice into a singular statement and focusing on a series of figure drawings, featuring 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 phenomenon. 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.