Isabel Nolan
Lionhuman confronts the void!
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| Year | 2016-2021 |
|---|---|
| Medium | Colour pencil and pencil on paper |
| Dimensions | 21.1 x 29.7 cm |
| Nominated by | Emma Goltz |
About the work
The Ice-Age sculpture Löwenmensch (in Engish literally Lionhuman) was carved out of a mammoth tusk approximately 40,000 years ago. My thinking goes that Lionhuman looks like the work of a human discovering that meaning is as malleable as clay. But it might simply be the protagonist of an ancient bedtime story, a story told to encourage small, unruly humans to go to sleep lest the Lionhuman come… An upright, half-human half-lion, I suspect the Lionhuman’s superpower is to happily live in a state of blissful in-betweenness.
About the artist:
Born 1974 Dublin, Isabel Nolan lives and works in Dublin.
Nolan’s work includes sculpture, textiles, paintings, drawings, photography and writing. Approaching large ideas at an intimate scale, her work focuses on the fundamental question of how humans bring the world into meaning. How we make, (through science, politics, agriculture, religion, etcetera), reality happen. Examining the knees of a sculpture, the status of a Palaeolithic artefact, or a solar storm in the 19th century, Nolan looks for the ways we can like, or even love, the difficult and complex human world we’ve made.
Selected exhibitions include The air between things, OCT Boxes Art Museum, Shunde (2020); Curling Up With Reality, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (2017); Calling on Gravity, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2017); Another View from Nowhen, London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE, London (2017); and The weakened eye of the day, Mercer Union, Toronto, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
