Isabel Nolan makes artworks that are fiercely tentative. Ideas are proposed and tested by the making and placing of new things in the world as Nolan considers how subjectivity is produced within transient horizons of meaning and expectation. The objects take different forms: sculptures, paintings, fabric hangings, and text based works. Usually they propose no overt message, nevertheless through their complexity, beauty and brittle inscrutability they insist on explication.

The sculptures include both open and closed forms, placed on plinths that give emphasis to their discrete thingness whilst underscoring the commonality of their origins. Often these objects are tense, self-

contained, enigmatic, and evocatively titled - inviting and thwarting one�s desire to discern a rationale. Other works, particularly paintings, are made as specific responses to certain artefacts or natural phenomena; they are produced to meet the demand that certain charged things place upon one�s attention. Wall based works - hangings, drawings and paintings, are frequently driven by a search for narratives that imagine times of anxiety, hope or estrangement, describing relations that shift between being empathetic and alienated.

Utilising a range of media to address an audience, Nolan posits the idea that artworks are events engaged in an attempt to produce meaning: she makes objects

that are intelligible yet simultaneously resist being known. Therein significance is paradoxical, cast simultaneously as something acquired rather than inherent but also perpetually elusive. Though there are frequent shifts in tone, between coldness, bemusement, melancholia and wonder, a point of entry common to much of Nolan�s work is its recognition of our seemingly implacable compulsion to define our situation and our relationships with others, our desire to understand �everything� - from our inner lives to the natural world.
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