Isabel Nolan’s “Dreamshook” Reimagines the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Dublin-based artist Isabel Nolan has turned the Irish pavilion into a secular chapel she calls Dreamshook. Visitors emerge from the Biennale’s central exhibition into a pale-yellow chamber flooded with daylight, where a radiant tapestry arches like a stained-glass window. The space includes bent-metal sculptures, tapestries, drawings and purpose-built benches for weary guests. A cluster of archangel wings bearing books hovers before a sun-lit orb above a fish-filled sea, creating a contemplative refuge amid the surrounding national pavilions.

The Guardian

The installation is anchored in the story of Aldo Manuzio, a 16th-century Venetian humanist printer. She adds that Manuzio is credited with inventing italics, blank margins, the semicolon and an early form of the paperback, and that he printed more first editions of classical Greek and Roman works than any other printer in history. Nolan presents Manuzio as a symbol of thoughtful scholarship during a period of famine, plague and papal crisis.

The Guardian

Nolan’s broader practice, highlighted in the forthcoming retrospective Some Fundamental Forces at Southwark Park Galleries, continues to celebrate transformative ideas. The show occupies a former church space and features works that reference figures such as Copernicus, Simone Weil and John Donne.

The Guardian

In discussing the role of grandeur in art, Nolan notes that it has been “weaponised to communicate powerful ideologies,” a sentiment she says informs her choice to create modest, earth-bound installations.

The Guardian

• “It’s very hard to take grandeur seriously, largely because it’s been so weaponised to communicate powerful ideologies,” — Isabel Nolan

The Guardian