It’s a long way to the Irish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. First, you pass through the biennale’s colossal central exhibition, housed in a sequence of cavernous medieval warehouses. After that, the route takes in a suite of national pavilions (the Philippines, Latvia, Timor-Leste, Morocco, Malta, Oman). By the time art-lovers reach Ireland’s presentation, they are frequently exhausted, if not delirious.
This year, Dublin-based artist Isabel Nolan has transformed the pavilion into a space of respite, both physical and intellectual – a secular chapel titled Dreamshook. Visitors emerge from darkness into a pale-yellow chamber flooded with daylight and face a radiant tapestry arched like a stained-glass window in a gothic cathedral. A cluster of archangel’s wings bearing books hovers before the vast orb of the sun above a fish-filled sea. Nolan works across sculpture, textile, painting, drawing and text, and Dreamshook is accordingly rich in colour and pictorial detail, including bent metal sculptures, tapestries and drawings. For the footsore and weary – ie everyone – she has even designed benches. Glory be.
“I think the history of Christianity has proven beyond doubt that they’re really good at weaponising aesthetics,” says Nolan, conspiratorially. She is frequently inspired to steal ecclesiastical flourishes in her exhibition-making, from archways to coloured light and iconography. “To use that kind of language to largely secular ends feels satisfying.”
Underpinning Dreamshook is the story of Aldo Manuzio, a humanist and printer working in Venice at the turn of the 16th century. One tapestry shows Manuzio asleep in his canopied bed, a little dog curled by his side, being visited by an angel in his dreams as the air teems with winged books and manuscripts. Manuzio had a vision in which books – until then, expensive and rarefied objects – might be portable and affordable. According to this vision, knowledge was no longer the purview of the church and noble families. In acting on it, Manuzio allowed the great texts of pre-Christian Europe to become common cultural currency.
Nolan tells me that Manuzio is credited with inventing italics, blank margins, the semicolon and the precursor to the paperback. “Of course, he was a Christian, but he was also a committed humanist, and he dedicated himself largely to publishing works of classical literature that for centuries had only survived in Arabic. He printed more first editions of classical Greek and Roman works than any other printer in history.” For Nolan, Manuzio is an emblem of thoughtfulness and scholarship in a turbulent era: Europe had been ravaged by famine and the Black Death, the papacy was in crisis and life was violent and unsettled. Even though he was a man of faith, Manuzio maintained his passion for disseminating secular knowledge.
Some Fundamental Forces, Nolan’s retrospective, is about to open at Southwark Park Galleries in London, bringing together works from the past 20 years. Aptly, part of the show occupies a former church space (the atmospheric Dilston Grove, now the Dilston Gallery). Like Dreamshook, the exhibition is a celebration of transformative ideas, including tributes to Copernicus, the philosopher Simone Weil and New Jersey’s Barthes of the Beretta, Tony Soprano.
As in Dreamshook, Nolan’s instinct is to celebrate scientists and innovators as fellow humans rather than venerating them as geniuses. One painting is titled, excitably, Copernicus! (Nolan admits to a weakness for exclamation marks). A drooping flag carries a beatific funerary portrait of the poet John Donne. In an accompanying text, Nolan writes of her fascination with the monument this portrait is based on in St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and the statue’s curiously wobbly knees. “It is,” she writes, “the conspicuousness of his knocked knees, the beguiling authenticity of that slight bend, that makes John Donne and his strange performance real to me.”
Visually, it’s a show full of objects that have attempted pompous swagger, but with only limited success. “It’s very hard to take grandeur seriously, largely because it’s been so weaponised to communicate powerful ideologies,” says Nolan. “Grandeur is attractive. It’s exciting. It’s rousing, but ultimately it’s often very hollow. There are works in the show that I think of as fallen and failed chandeliers, and flags that are bent and scrape the floor.”
As an appropriate spirit animal for all this bathos, Nolan turns to the donkey: a creature of contradictory associations, at once a lowly beast and an emblem of Christ. In the drawing Sisyphus, a donkey appears as a tiny, isolated figure – a bearer of impossible burdens. Donkeys also help slice through her own temptations toward grandeur. She has created magnificent tapestries, including one featuring the oldest surviving figure sculpture – a diminutive carving known as The Lion Man – and another of a turbulent and mysterious skyscape. A wall-sized photograph of two donkeys in a graveyard look over her work like guardian spirits. As ever, her instinct is to bring people down to earth, herself included.
• Isabel Nolan: Some Fundamental Forces is at Southwark Park Galleries, London, from 15 August to 1 November. The Venice Biennale runs until 22 November
