Isabel Nolan’s Venice Biennale project begins with a striking absence: she cannot call up mental images at will.
The Irish artist has aphantasia, a condition formally named in 2015 by British neurologist Adam Zeman. For Nolan, that means memory does not arrive as a private cinema. Instead, it is built through research, archives, and the emotional force of things seen, handled, and studied over time. That way of working now shapes “Dreamshook,” her exhibition for the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
At the center of the project is Aldo Manuzio, the Venetian printer who set up shop in the late 15th century and is credited with inventing a portable book format that helped anticipate the modern paperback. Nolan has been drawn to the late medieval period more broadly, a moment when Western thought was shifting away from religious dogma and toward humanist inquiry. In her hands, that history becomes less a lesson than a living structure for thinking about how images, texts, and ideas travel.
“Dreamshook” includes hand-tufted tapestries, sculptures, and drawings. Nolan’s work is known for its clean lines and restrained color, but the underlying process is deeply accumulative. She has described drawing as a way of storing perspective and feeling when memory alone will not suffice. The result is art that feels carefully composed without becoming closed off; it invites attention rather than demanding it.
To prepare for the exhibition, Nolan traveled through Vicenza, Padua, Pisa, and Florence to study early Renaissance art, including works by Giotto and Sassetta. She also looked to the Book of Kells at Trinity College Dublin, folding a distinctly Irish source into a project shaped by Italian book history and medieval visual culture.
That tension between the imagined and the real sits at the heart of the exhibition. Nolan has said the threshold between the two can be fluid and exciting, but also unsettling. In “Dreamshook,” that instability becomes a source of form: a way to make thought visible without pretending that thought is ever fully fixed.
IsabelNolan VeniceBiennale IrishPavilion ContemporaryArt RenaissanceArt BookHistory
