Isabel Nolan on Downwardness, Saints, and Loving an Awful World

Isabel Nolan's exhibition '499 Seconds' is on view at Château La Coste in Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade through June 4. The Dublin-based artist works across painting, drawing, rugs, metal sculptures, photography, and writing. Her practice challenges Western veneration of height and light, focusing instead on downwardness—floor-based sculptures, lowering suns, feet, and rugs. She photographs the deathbed statue of John Donne at St Paul's Cathedral, zooming in on his knees. Her alternative pantheon includes Paul Thek, Simone Weil, Giordano Bruno, and fictional mobster Tony Soprano, whom she painted in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. Nolan's recent works invoke the Löwenmensch, a 38,000 BCE mammoth tusk sculpture. Her current show at Château La Coste features saints Jerome and Paula, waves, fish, microscopic phenomena, passage-grave motifs, Greek myths, and dissolving suns. She describes her research as 'apophenic' and her work as an attempt to love the world despite ecological terror and cognitive dissonance. Nolan grew up in Ireland during the Troubles, with a feminist mother who earned a PhD in her fifties, shaping her scepticism toward power.