Solstice presents a significant exhibition of work by Irish Artist Isabel Nolan, ‘A delicate bond which is also a gap’.

Free entry, no booking required.

The bonds that hold us together, which make us less alone and enable us to inhabit this world are simultaneously sub-atomic and social, both fundamental and a matter of convention. It’s not miraculous but it can feel as near as dammit. We are the brief emanations of fields that are electromagnetic, gravitational, chemical, temporal, psychic, social, and cultural. Perceiving the seemingly infinite array of gaps that constitute our crude and delicate selves and the universe, we work constantly to understand, to close, or bridge them. We do this over and over again, alone but together. – Isabel Nolan

‘A delicate bond which is also a gap’ ranges across a vast span of time beginning with woven images of the 40,000-year-old sculpture “Löwenmensch” and concluding with an ambitious, specially commissioned tapestry depicting the disintegration of the sun. The exhibition includes new textile work, sculptures, drawings, painting and text.

Date for your diary: Saturday 21 August
Reception / Artist talk with Isabel Nolan, Sue Rainsford & Francis McKee 
Time: 2:30 pm | Admission: Free

New drawings and sculpture undertaken during Covid restrictions weave through the exhibition. Drawings of looping spirals and leaf like lozenges chime with the significant megalithic art of the ancient landscape surrounding the arts centre. The exhibition includes a sculpture dedicated to Ludwig Boltzmann, a physicist who transformed our understanding of entropy and the future disorderliness of the universe. A major new textile work depicts a wave, which Nolan imagines has travelled for over two thousand years since it first engulfed St Cuthbert on the holy island of Lindisfarne. These diverse artistic investigations are driven by intensive research, giving generous form to fundamental questions about the ways the world is made meaningful through human activity.

Isabel Nolan was born in 1974 in Dublin, Ireland. Recent shows include The air between things, two- person exhibition with Stephen McKenna, OCT Boxes Art Museum, Shunde, China (2019); Ein Fuß in der Welt / One Foot in the World, Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany (2018); Another View from Nowhen, London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE, UK (2017–18); Curling up with reality, Grazer Kunstverein, Austria (2017–2018); Calling on Gravity, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2017); The weakened eye of day, Mercer Union, Toronto and CAG, Vancouver (both Canada, 2016) and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2014) and A hole into the future, Musée d’art moderne de Saint Etienne, France (2012).

Nolan is represented by Kerlin Gallery, Ireland