The Brooklyn Rail

“We know by what we share in, not just by what we analyse,” reads the lower right of On Imagination (with Petrarchinos) (all works 2026), a drawing on view as part of Isabel Nolan’s Dreamshook, representing Ireland in this year’s Venice Biennale. The evolution of imagination into idea and representation into reality is a longtime theme of the Dublin-based Nolan, whose work spans tapestries, painting, photography, sculpture, installation, and, incessantly, drawing. Dreamshook includes fourteen sculptures, drawings, and tufted tapestries, all of which poetically explore the life and work of the Venetian printer and publisher Aldo Manuzio (ca. 1450–1515) in a distillation of how knowledge is a process of shared experience when an individual’s dream becomes a communal reality.

Nolan, born in 1974, grew up in an Ireland in transition from a country isolated at Europe’s edge to a global nexus during the Celtic Tiger’s 1990s rise. As a child, Nolan always drew with graphite or colored pencils, and eventually studied at the National College of Art & Design. Seeing the Irish time-based installation artist James Coleman (b. 1941) introduced the idea that artists were living and not just historical. Perhaps Nolan’s sense and interest in time—often implied in her work through repeated motifs such as suns or sunsets—could owe to Coleman, but certainly her ambitious scale and sense of material relationship found examples in Irish women artists working in sculpture and installation in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Alice Maher (b. 1956), whose narrative textiles and figurative sculpture are included in In Minor Keys. Unlike Coleman or Maher, however, Nolan is less specific in her references and more sharply absurd in her abstraction, as if channeling the modernist writers the island is so known for.

For instance, in Dreamshook’s arched centerpiece, the vibrantly colored, hand-tufted Aldus Dreams of a Plentiful Supply of Good Books tells the story, in one compact tableau, of Manuzio’s efforts to clarify the written word (he is credited with introducing the semicolon and italics, as well as innovating portable, pocket-sized books). In it, Manuzio figures as both asleep under a checked duvet—a church key dangling from his wrist on a red string—and awake and reading at the bed’s edge. A swirl of open books is at his fingertips, but behind a translucent yellow curtain, while a winged, harp-playing angel steps on a pile of books on the left. This scene takes place in a Venetian dwelling presided over by a bucolic farmhouse under a starry night. The composition, with its juxtaposition of fantasy and history in a palette of 1950s Technicolor, is more cartoon than history or altar painting. Nolan’s figuration here feels innocent and guileless, akin to a child’s illustration of a legend, and the shaggy surface of the weave implies an animated, fictive quality, as if the composition could completely change if a hand ran over the wool that composes it. This central tapestry is flanked by Hilma af Klint-reminiscent The Dreams of Reason Produce Monsters (the Seraphim of the Canon) and the Boschian Make Haste Slowly. While both are figurative, including references to books, the sun, trees, and water, they are more lyrical than the centerpiece, meditating on the power of reading and knowledge (Enlightenment) and its perils (colonialism and its attendant evils).

Ambivalence and a sense of sudden shifts course through Dreamshook. While the tufted wool tapestries are densely opaque in color and composition, the accompanying steel and wood sculptures are airily pellucid—more breezy, outlined frame than solid image. Nevertheless, Oh! and A Hole into the Future (1494), specifically reference open, curtained windows and a cityscape with an anchor, respectively. Placed directly on the pavilion’s concrete floor, these sculptures form thresholds or portals from one perspective to another, their dreamy color and sleekly outlandish shapes suggesting the imagination needed to conceive of another world beyond your own. Look carefully at what structures our reality, Nolan seems to say, and it will quickly dissolve into the abstractions in either language or image that we create to make sense of it. If these steel sculptures seem simple or neat in contrast to the tufted piece, this works to enhance the feeling of dissonance between our expectation, perception, and discernment, tremors to which could shake and shatter our realities.

This sentiment is most clearly articulated in the titular piece, placed horizontally at the installation’s center. Impossible to fully see straight on, Dreamshook is a cacophony of steel and cherrywood that must be circled to comprehend in full. Pink and yellow diamond shapes, overlaid with slender yellow steel arcs, shatter from a central rectangular wooden platform, on which a skeletal white structure sits, casting shadows below. All an amalgam of line, shape, color, volume, space, and texture, Dreamshook is a total abstraction, its meaning dependent on the context that surrounds it. Suns and sunrays in the arcs and diamonds begin to emerge as we see the suns punctuating other nearby works; perhaps the boxy white rectangle is a book, from which the shadows of ideas and illusions are cast.

However enigmatic this central sculpture is, Nolan’s small, precise drawings on the exhibition’s rear side walls are sharply lucid. Including quotes, precise sketches that are almost diagrams or illustrations, and snippets of hands touching books, these drawings are the quiet essence of Dreamshook and demonstrate not only Nolan’s hand but her depth and breadth of artistic research into epistemology. The drawings are signifiers of a more embodied experience of knowledge production, expanded through the sharing of space within the exhibition, itself a threshold into an imaginary world made real.