It\u2019s a long way to the Irish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. First, you pass through the biennale\u2019s 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\u2019s presentation, they are frequently exhausted, if not delirious.<\/p>\n
This year, Dublin-based artist Isabel Nolan has transformed the pavilion into a space of respite, both physical and intellectual \u2013 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 ie everyone \u2013 she has even designed benches. Glory be.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the history of Christianity has proven beyond doubt that they\u2019re really good at weaponising aesthetics,\u201d says Nolan, conspiratorially. She is frequently inspired to steal ecclesiastical flourishes in her exhibition-making, from archways to coloured light and iconography. \u201cTo use that kind of language to largely secular ends feels satisfying.\u201d<\/p>\n
An instinct to celebrate \u2026 Copernicus, A Hole Into the Future, from 2011. Photograph: Lee Welch\/Courtesy the artist<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 until then, expensive and rarefied objects \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
Nolan tells me that Manuzio is credited with inventing italics, blank margins, the semicolon and the precursor to the paperback. \u201cOf 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Art Weekly<\/p>\n Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u2018Beguiling\u2019 \u2026 Bent Knees are a Give 2, a Nolan work inspired by John Donne from 2015. Photograph: Denis Mortell\/Courtesy the artist<\/p>\n Some Fundamental Forces, Nolan\u2019s 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<\/a> and New Jersey\u2019s Barthes of the Beretta, Tony Soprano.<\/p>\n As in Dreamshook, Nolan\u2019s 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\u2019s Cathedral in London, and the statue\u2019s curiously wobbly knees. \u201cIt is,\u201d she writes, \u201cthe conspicuousness of his knocked knees, the beguiling authenticity of that slight bend, that makes John Donne and his strange performance real to me.\u201d<\/p>\n Visually, it\u2019s a show full of objects that have attempted pompous swagger, but with only limited success. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to take grandeur seriously, largely because it\u2019s been so weaponised to communicate powerful ideologies,\u201d says Nolan. \u201cGrandeur is attractive. It\u2019s exciting. It\u2019s rousing, but ultimately it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 a diminutive carving known as The Lion Man \u2013 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.<\/p>\n