Isabel Nolan: Dreamshook

Isabel Nolan represents Ireland at the 61st Venice Biennale with Dreamshook, curated by Georgina Jackson with The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art, and commissioned by Culture Ireland and The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

The word Dreamshook describes the feeling of waking from a dream, when reality is destabilised and realms of possibility linger and dissipate. Nolan’s exhibition of hand-tufted tapestry, drawing, and sculpture represents thresholds, dream states and narratives that strain the distinctions between the immaterial and the actual. The work develops from her sustained fascination with the human desire to find meaning or order in the universe, and the frameworks that shape our understanding of the world.

Nolan looks to the Middle Ages and early Renaissance as an era that resonates with now. It was a turbulent period marked by religious and political upheaval, a time transformed by plague, wars and famine. Cultural and technological developments in Europe cultivated profound ideological change, challenged the nature of authority, and reshaped what it might mean to be human. The work draws on artefacts and ideas from those formative times that helped pattern the present-day: from the emergence of humanism, dramatic developments in Italian painting and architecture; to the invention of the printing press in Europe. 

She focuses on the figure of Aldo Manuzio (c.1450–1515), an innovative, influential printer and publisher based in Venice. As the century turned, Manuzio, widely known as Aldus Manutius, transformed the culture of reading in small and large ways: introducing the semi-colon and italics; and more significantly producing numerous, portable enchiridions (pocket-sized books), beautifully designed with wide margins and modern typography. In his promotion of key writings by influential contemporary humanists and numerous Greek and Roman classical works—newly, conscientiously edited and never before published in Europe—he hoped to champion the idea of human perfectibility and foster a more “civilised” world. 

At the centre of the exhibition is a pair of large-scale arched tapestries featuring apparitions. In Aldus Dreams of a Plentiful Supply of Good Books (2026), Nolan imagines Aldo’s dream with numerous nods to the art and architecture of the early Renaissance. Nearby, Dreamshook (2026) stages an unyielding bed adrift on an unstable floor, a loose constellation of abstract forms. It is accompanied by Oh! (2026), a curtain that seems paradoxically still and in motion. A cluster of drawings capture fragments of thought—quotes, annotations, and speculative reflections on dreams and readers across time. Moving fluidly between the intimate and the expansive, the tangible and the imagined, the exhibition invites viewers into a space where dreams press insistently on reality—shaping it, unsettling it, and revealing its hidden contours.

From Manuzio’s ambitions to publish “a plentiful supply of books”, to moments of hope and transformation, Nolan invokes these histories to signal how the architectures of belief and knowledge we inhabit often stretch the limits of credibility. Drawing on literature, history, religion, and mythology, the works ground far-reaching subjects in intimate, material encounters, exploring how meaning and connection are forged in the turmoil of the present day. Dreamshook invites speculation on how the dynamics of wonder, belief and power shape both expectations and human experience, and how we encounter the world in all its messiness and debatable beauty.

As curator Georgina Jackson says, “Dreamshook is a dazzling new body of work that invites visitors into a materialised dream state where hierarchies and expectation collapse. Unfolding from Manuzio’s dream inviting us to pick up books rather than arms, the work weaves moments of hope and societal change amidst crisis; histories that resonate strongly with our own time. In her singular practice with vibrant colour and texture, Nolan prompts us to find some hope in the face of indifference, and to seek connection in this complex world we’ve made.”

Accompanying the project will be a book published by The Douglas Hyde, co-edited by Niamh Darling, Georgina Jackson and Isabel Nolan, designed by Tony Waddingham, and with contributions by Darran Anderson, Caroline Campbell, Niamh Darling and Isabel Nolan.